Take the free ride

Alright look. There are a lot of exciting new products out there which are essentially vibe-coded middleware for your other tools. Design, configure, deploy your workflows in natural language. Things like that. I’m sure they are great!

Despite the fact that I hate AI you’d be completely mad if you owned a software business and didn’t make use of the huge capability Claude does offer for virtually free. I’ve always got a couple of terminals open with Claude Code doing tasks for me.

On the other hand, building a business as a layer on top of Claude (or whichever is your preferred LLM flavour) is a terrible strategy and I say “thanks but no thanks” to any of these tools.

We’re all adults here. We know the playbook! Uber took a fat stack of VC money and ran services at a loss until they were the only game in town and then jacked up the prices. We all had a bunch of free rides, right? Paypal literally gave everyone a tenner the first time they used it. Remember that? Graze sent everybody a box of cashews. Yum!

Seems like a great deal. Have the ride, take the tenner, eat the nuts! But here’s what you should not have done. You definitely should not build a business that relies on the free rides from Uber.

You couldn’t run your own business using the Uber free rides because you must realise they won’t last forever and you need to have a solution in place for getting stuff and people relocated in an affordable way. You couldn’t rely on free nuts from Graze if you were starting a salad bar. Can you put cashews in a salad? I actually have no idea.

I don’t use Uber now my track car is road-legal.

You definitely could not provide a subscription service built on free rides from Uber. Your pitch to customers: we’ll bring you this thing once a week. Here’s a discount for paying for a year in advance! Then the free rides end. Now your subscription business is under water. You’ve already taken the cash and promised the services.

Make no mistake. Have the free (or well below cost) thing. Take it and enjoy it! Make good use of it. Don’t expect it to be free or affordable forever. Don’t get hooked on the free thing. Definitely don’t build your business around reselling the free thing! Certainly do not sign up to a long-term contract with a company that has built its whole product around reselling the free thing.