Building for an Audience of One

We builders like to build. And when we’ve built something, we believe it deserves an audience. If it was hard to build, it should be of value to others. Only things worth the effort cleared the bar for getting created in the first place. Effort was a filter.

Now, this filter is largely gone. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Replit, Lovable have collapsed the distance from idea to reality. Non-programmers can ship software. Programmers can ship ten times more of it. But the mindset has not caught up. We are still fixated on a larger audience.

And the data says we’re doing this in record numbers: Domain registrations surged in 2025 after two years of near-zero growth. New iOS app submissions, which had been declining steadily since 2016, jumped 24% last year, then accelerated to an 84% year-over-year gain in Q1 2026 alone. Every builder is rushing their new creation out to reach a larger audience.

Demand didn’t get the memo

The domain registration still feels like the first step of publishing. The App Store submission still feels like putting something into the world. That impulse - to share what you’ve made - is deeply human and not going away. But the other side of the equation is unchanged: whether anyone actually needs what you’ve made. Overall demand for consumer software isn’t growing faster because building tools improved. People aren’t waking up wanting more apps. If anything, as AI assistants handle more tasks directly, the need for dedicated single-purpose consumer apps is under quiet pressure from above.

The results are predictable: a wave of launches meeting unmoved audiences. Domains that see no traffic. Apps that accumulate no reviews. Tools built to scratch someone’s itch that turned out to be very specifically their own.

The quality bar is going up, not down

There’s a related dynamic that makes the mismatch even sharper. The same forces that made building easier have also dampened the need for purpose-built software. When an AI assistant can handle a task in a conversation, the bar a dedicated app must clear to earn a place on someone’s phone keeps rising. Why download and learn a specialised tool when the thing you already have open can do it adequately?

So at the exact moment when it became trivially easy to build and publish an app, the threshold for users to adopt one quietly moved up. More supply meeting a higher bar. The squeeze is coming from both sides.

I’m not making an argument against building, but an argument for being honest about who you’re building for before you start. If the answer is “mostly myself, with a faint hope that others will find it useful”, that’s worth knowing early, and it’s not a reason not to build. It’s a reason to calibrate your expectations, and maybe to skip the App Store submission entirely.

The reframe

Most builders will work this out gradually, not through argument, but through experience. The reckoning is slow because the cost of building has collapsed, so the cost of being wrong is mostly time rather than money. That extends the learning curve.

But I think the destination is actually a good one. When the lesson lands, many builders will stop spending energy on distribution and start spending it on making excellent things for themselves. The quiet automation that handles something only you do, the small tool that is deeply valuable to you, without an App Store page or a public URL. These tools don’t need product-market fit. They already have it: You and your tool.

Building for an audience of one is still building. It’s often the most honest kind. The builder instinct - the need to make something real and ship it into the world - is worth preserving. The part worth letting go of is the assumption that “shipping into the world” is what gives it value.

April 2026 · Data sources: Verisign DNIB (domain registrations); Appfigures (App Store releases 2016–2025); Sensor Tower via AppleInsider (Q1 2026 App Store submissions)