Don't ever let anyone say you are just building a wrapper (or another todo app)
In today's world, nothing is truly new; most of it is just about niching down and adding a new layer of value. The same goes for most software (or yet another todo app).
Vercel, a popular hosting site, is just really a wrapper for big tech companies (they mostly host on AWS). They don't really own their servers; they merely improve developer experience (DX). Resend, a YC-backed company, is just a wrapper to send email. Even in everyday things, at the bare bones, cloud computing is just someone else's servers wrapped in an interface. Don't even get me started with Serverless. We see it in all forms, even in everyday life. Convenience stores, for example, are just supermarkets nearer to you, albeit a little more expensive, and are sort of a wrapper for buying groceries. Notion is also a wrapper of a database and UI that allows users to create their own pages; it just adds multiple layers for everyday consumers. It is literally mostly wrappers everywhere. That is how businesses operate; they do not create something out of thin air but rather take something and add another layer of value or niche down for a specific demographic.
I built yet another wrapper/todo list (https://segundoapps.com), and here's why I think it's different and why I still think productivity apps are not over-saturated.
After discussing with a few business owners, here are the things they still need help with, regardless of all the applications that exist today:
- They need help managing their tasks and delegating them to other people (todo lists).
- Lead generation - finding consumer leads (web scraper).
- They need help creating client invoices (PDF generation).
- They need help tracking time - on top of the todo list, track your employees' activity and what they spend most of their time on (todo list with time tracking).
- They need help finding customer bookings - skip the big third-party providers and directly give your loyal customers a way to book and pay for your services online (Shopify).
- They need help saving time in data encoding - a lot of business owners hire data encoders/admins. For example, a lot of people just manually type customer details to create generic contracts. A lot of time is wasted on typos and PDF generation (OCR).
Why do I call it a todo list (or wrapper) when it obviously does more than one thing? Because at the core of it all, it is just a wrapper. I am not creating new technology; it is just mostly CRUD operations wrapped with good UX. Also, because my niche is small business owners, they do not want to sign up for 'business software'; it sounds too enterprise-like, and small business owners know enterprises are expensive and have a lot of bureaucracy. Too time-consuming and too large of a commitment. Again, it all falls into what your niche is.
Why am I sharing this? Am I not afraid of my business idea being stolen? Nope. As I said, nothing is truly new. It's not rocket science that the problems of business owners today are the same as ever. It's easy to build software from the ground up, code or no-code; there are multitudes of applications today that will help you do that. Getting market share, finding the right product-market fit, that is where the challenge lies. There are probably a handful of software that exist today with less than 10 users. Segundo Apps does nothing groundbreaking but niches down to solve the problems of small business owners. I had various conversations with business owners and started building for them.
So what really is my point? Do not let anyone tell you that you are building just a wrapper, todo list, or that it has been done before, because most of the time everything truly has been done before. It is a deadly mindset in entrepreneurship to assume that you can only build something that has never existed before. A lot of the businesses that exist today are just 'wrappers' of one form or another that aim to niche down and add an extra layer of value.
Nothing is truly new, keep building!
