Most of us have been thinking about AI as a productivity story. Elena Verna sees it as an economic one. She is talking to Lenny’s newsletter.

Her argument : the biggest impact from AI won’t be helping existing software companies build faster. It’ll be enabling millions of people who were previously locked out of software creation to become builders and founders themselves. If she’s right, we’ll soon see an explosion of niche software businesses, from people who deeply understand the problem they’re solving. She calls it mom and pop SaaS.

So many stories about AI focus on developer productivity or replacing developers altogether. And sure, non-technical teams can launch their own stuff. But that framing misses the bigger shift. The real change is what type of software is now getting built.

For decades, creating software required access to a small, highly specialized group of people concentrated in a handful of tech hubs and funded by venture capital. That meant only ideas large enough to justify those costs ever made it into the world. As the cost and complexity of building collapse, that constraint disappears. The winners won’t just be faster developers. They’ll be teachers, real estate agents, accountants, coaches, consultants, small business owners, and domain experts of every kind solving problems they understand deeply. The future of software won’t be defined by a tiny group of elite builders. The future of software will be defined by everyone else.

Get ready to start seeing (and hopefully building) more and more products from unexpected places. This will be software built by local experts with limited technical experience, but way more experience in everything else.

Elena Verna call this Mom-and-Pop SaaS !

For many, software math was not mathing

Software building has been ridiculously expensive in the past. Want a website ? That will cost you a few thousand bucks. Want a small app or integration ? Get ready for a 5 digit price tag (if you are hiring offshore, otherwise add another 0). And listen, it was warranted. Good software engineers don’t just know multiple coding languages, they also understand all of the complex structures underneath the surface that make it all work. It took time to learn and get good at, so it was v pricey.

And when the cost is high, the price must be high to make the math work. Software developers demanded (and deserved) high salaries, and people that wanted to work with them inevitably drifted toward massive markets and massive opportunities. (What was the number one question in software companies ?: ‘WHAT’S YOUR TAM ???’ It better have ‘B’ as the first letter haha)

The result is that thousands of perfectly good ideas never got built. Because software math was not mathing for them. There are so many industries, professions, communities, hobbies, and niches that desperately needed software but could never justify the cost of creating it. A local soccer club, a vacation rental operator, an orthodontist, a wedding photographer, a recruiter, a teacher, an artist … The list is infinite.

So, yeah, developers writing code faster is cool. But the really big deal is that when AI dramatically lowers the cost of creating software, entirely new markets and categories become economically viable.

Welcome to the era of Mom-and-Pop SaaS

People who aren’t part of the tech industry at all can now create lovable software products :

A recruiter can create recruiting software.

A real estate agent can create real estate software.

A soccer coach can create soccer software.

A property manager can create property management software.

Just like the creator economy taught us that one person can become a media company (Hello Lenny), the builder economy is teaching us that one person can become a software company.

Every profession contains knowledge, decisions, workflows, and expertise that can be transformed into software. We’re just beginning to see what happens when millions of people gain the ability to actually do that.

Plus, check out the monetization data. These aren’t just hobbies, people ! 80% of builders are creating something they intend to monetize. 35% are already generating revenue. The most common applications being built are websites and landing pages, business operations software, consumer applications, and dashboards and analytics.

To conclude, What’s dying is the idea that successful software companies need to look like venture-backed Silicon Valley startups. But SaaS was never really about venture capital. It was about turning expertise into a product that could be sold over and over again.

The difference now is that millions more people can do it.