The hardest part of building software isn't the coding

I've spent years building software and I've slowly realized that coding is often the easy part. The difficult part is deciding what not to build. You can spend weeks making something technically impressive that nobody actually needs. The older I get, the more I think good product development is mostly saying "no" to interesting ideas. Curious if other founders eventually came to the same conclusion.

9 comments held Reddit says 1 on reddit ↗

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u/[deleted] 1 3 days ago

[removed] — already gone when the archive first saw it
u/False-Egg-1386 1 3 days ago

Yeah, I agree. Building is usually easier than choosing the right thing to build. A lot of good product work is just cutting scope and saying no early.
u/mawktheone 1 3 days ago

Id say the hard part is making cold calls and convincing someone to buy it off you
u/Falker_The 1 3 days ago

As the founder of a bootstrapped and profitable SaaS: yes. The challenge is in determining what to build and what actually delivers value. This is also why I laugh at those who think LLMs are going to destroy SaaS
u/vacantbay 1 3 days ago

They may not destroy SaaS overall, but LLMs will definitely allow skilled individuals to exploit gaps or poor functionality in existing SaaS products. More competition, greater innovation.
u/l0nguyen 1 3 days ago

It's not poorly functioning, check again. It even conveniently provides the answer to verify.
u/betahaxorz 1 3 days ago

I would agree for the most part, but this is very heavily dependant on what the product is. If it's some sort of CRM, then no. But if you were Larry and Sergey building Google, or one of the founders of Databricks, arguably coding was very much the hard part.
u/PlaybookPress 1 3 days ago

Came to the same conclusion a while back. Building is the fun part, which makes it easy to confuse activity with progress. Saying no to shiny ideas is most of the job honestly.