20 Jun 2025 • Calgary, AB
Software Isn’t dead. Your time is now.
We live in a time with the highest potential for value arbitrage in the software space that’s ever been seen. Companies are paying millions of dollars a year for relatively straightforward software. Why? Because they’re offered it by sources with some sort of grand public reputation, maybe a bank, maybe a big consulting firm. That’s where you come in, someone who knows how to build good software, and can leverage all the tools available today to deliver, and deliver, and deliver.
There are two big categories of opportunity here, the first being replacing legacy software. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of legacy software exist, across every organization that’s been around long enough to have them, and many that haven’t. Your town runs on some software for budgeting that barely holds together and they’re dying to build an in house solution for the most annoying part of it. The company your friend works at has a mainframe computer that’s been around since the 80’s that has no documentation. Your company is getting held for ransom by some bank cheque database and viewing software that charges them 70k a month. The value of a piece of software is NOT related to its complexity.
The second is new software. Within most large companies there are dozens of new software work proposals every month. Guess what? The third party companies at big firms are quoting hundreds of thousands of dollars for that chatbot on top of company data, with 30k a month in “maintenance costs”. You know you can make the exact same thing for way less money. You have access to the same AI models as those guys, and the same programming languages and you can spin up a front end for it in a month.
Okay but how do we even find these opportunities? You won’t be shocked, the answer is talking to people, telling them what you’re working on. Starting with small inventive projects that get people talking, who will then reach out to you for their next idea. This touches on people’s biggest misconception about “networking” but don’t even get me started on that.
It all essentially boils down to providing additional value, disproportionately to the cost of interacting with you via hiring you, having a conversation or even someone reading your post. (Thanks by the way, I hope you’re getting something out of this.) The opportunities to arbitrage the value of software have never been more numerous. Go have one conversation every day this week you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Everyone loves talking about problems, and you are uniquely suited to solve them.