Software Is No Longer the Scarce Resource. Evidence Is.
For most of my career, building software was expensive.
You assembled a team, spent months writing code, deployed carefully and hoped the market agreed with your assumptions. Development cost was often the biggest barrier to innovation.
But that world is changing rapidly.
Modern frameworks, cloud infrastructure and AI-assisted development mean a small engineering team can now build sophisticated applications at a fraction of the historical cost. The technical barrier to entry has fallen dramatically.
However, that doesn’t mean building a successful startup has become easier.
It means the challenges have moved.
The New Constraint
It is no longer a case of
“Can we build it?”
Now it is
“Can we prove anyone wants it?”
This is where many founders still think like engineers.
Successsful founders, in my experience, refect on what is working technically and what isn’t. That is, every product should be designed to learn and these answers don’t come from intuition alone.
They come from data.
Build the Infrastructure Early
One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating analytics as something to add later.
In reality, your analytics platform is as important as your application.
Capture events, store them properly and make them searchable.
Build dashboards that show a growing company and let the data answer the questions investors will ask.
The companies that understand their product best and have far more convincing evidence when speaking to investors.
Why Investors Care
Software can be rebuilt. Traction can take time to return or may be lost to a competitor.
An investor is rarely investing in the current version of your application. They’re investing in evidence that your team understands a problem deeply enough to build something people repeatedly choose to use.
Strong data demonstrates:
- Product-market fit
- Customer engagement
- Retention
- Growth
- Commercial potential
Those signals are often far more valuable than another feature release.
A New Engineering Mindset
As engineers, we naturally enjoy building. The joy is in the making!
But today’s best software teams don’t just build products, they build systems that help them learn faster than their competitors.
The application is only one part of the product.
The data, the feedback loops and the decision-making infrastructure surrounding it are increasingly where long-term value is created.