Why I’m building an AI marketplace instead of another SaaS
I noticed something while trying to use AI tools as a solo founder.
There isn’t a lack of AI tools. There’s a lack of clarity.
Agents, workflows, automations, custom AI services — everything is scattered across Twitter threads, Gumroad pages, random landing pages, and GitHub repos.
If you’re not already deep in AI, it’s overwhelming.
So instead of building another narrow SaaS, I’m building a marketplace where:
AI agents
AI workflows
AI services
AI apps
…can live in one place and actually be usable.
Still very early. Still messy.
But I’m convinced discovery is the real problem in AI right now.
Would love to hear if others feel the same.
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This is a nice idea. Wonder if my AI project could be on here one day. But the speed AI is moving it could be hard to make a marketplace everything could be a option.
This hits on something important. The issue isn’t a lack of AI tools it’s the mental cost of finding them, understanding them, and knowing which ones are actually worth using.
The discovery angle is especially strong. Most people don’t fail because tools are bad, but because the path from “I have a problem” to “this works for me” is fragmented and noisy.
The curation vs openness tradeoff feels like the real challenge here. Getting that right is probably what turns this from a directory into something people actually rely on.
Agree on discovery being the bottleneck. I'm building a tech news aggregator and face a similar problem — there's no shortage of content, but helping people find what's actually valuable is the hard part.
Marleg's point about noise is real. What I've learned: curation needs to be opinionated rather than neutral. When you try to show everything, you end up showing nothing useful.
Curious how you're thinking about quality control — will you curate listings yourself, or rely on some kind of signal (reviews, usage data)?
Totally agree discovery and clarity are the real bottlenecks in AI right now, and a centralized marketplace could be a game-changer.
Discovery being the real problem feels right, but marketplaces tend to get noisy fast imo. Curious how you keep “clarity” once sellers start optimizing for visibility instead of usefulness.