20 Jun 2025 • Calgary, AB
Software isn’t dead. If anything, we’re living through the greatest moment for builders willing to ship. Companies are paying millions of dollars a year for straightforward tools because the pitch comes from a big bank, a household-name consultancy, or a vendor with glossy brochures. That’s the arbitrage: you know how to build, you have today’s AI stack at your fingertips, and you can deliver again and again without the bloated overhead.
Opportunities split into two massive buckets.
1. Replace the legacy anchors
Every town, every mid-sized business, every Fortune 500 has software held together by the last person who remembered how it worked. Municipal budgeting tools that crash during tax season, mainframes from the 80s that no one dares to touch, $70K-per-month banking viewers charging ransom rates for basic database queries—the value of software is not tied to its complexity. If you can modernize the workflows that keep an organization alive, you can set your own price.
2. Build the net-new ideas
Inside large companies there are dozens of fresh software proposals every month. The incumbents quote six figures for a chatbot sitting on top of company data plus $30K in “maintenance.” You can ship the same thing faster and for far less. You use the same models, the same languages, and you can launch the front end in weeks. The difference is you’re hungry, responsive, and unencumbered by bureaucracy.
So how do you uncover these chances? Talk to people. Show the small experiments you’re working on. Word travels, and suddenly someone is asking if you can rebuild that dashboard, automate that report, or take over the next AI pilot. Networking isn’t about schmoozing—it’s about solving problems in public so others invite you to solve theirs.
The formula is simple: provide outsized value compared to the friction of working with you. That can start with a single conversation, a quick prototype, or even a post like this one (thanks for reading). Arbitraging the value of software has never been more attainable. Go have one conversation every day this week that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Everyone loves to vent about their broken systems, and you are uniquely positioned to fix them.
#software #entrepreneurship #buildinpublic