Stop building for our bubble | The Build Brief #6

This week is a bit different, no new idea but an exercise I think every one of us should do right now!!

Here's the thing: targeting devs and founders with a classic SaaS makes less and less sense, I'm just you noticed it. Everyone in our bubble is now building their own tools by hand with AI, so if your product can be rebuilt in a weekend, your customers will just do that instead of paying you... To be fair, our bubble still pays for things that can't be vibe coded, like distribution, an audience, a community, data or a marketplace (that's literally why Uneed still works), but for most tools, the window is closing fast IMO.

So the exercise is simple: take your idea and try to pivot it toward a target that will NEVER build it themselves. I see three main options:

Hyper consumer, not technical at all. The market is huge, but people pay less and churn more, and you'll have to reach them through social media, which means you'll basically become a content creator as much as a developer.
Hyper old-school B2B, companies so stuck in their habits that they won't use AI to its full potential anytime soon. Sales cycles are long, but once they're in, they almost never leave and they pay well. The catch is that you need a foot in the industry, like a friend, a relative or a previous job.
Hyper hyper niche, like archery clubs, cemeteries, beekeepers or whatever. Be careful though, some niches are passionate but broke! A quick test I like: is there a federation, a trade show, a magazine or a big Facebook group for this niche? If yes, you have a way to reach them, and usually there's money in it.

A few other angles and ideas:

Regulated industries like healthcare, notaries, construction or transport, where compliance and liability protect you way better than any feature. Nobody is going to vibe code their own food safety traceability software.
Sell the result, not the tool. An AI-powered service instead of a SaaS, because even people who could build the tool will happily pay for someone to just get the job done for them.
Anything physical or local, like restaurants, local shops or events, because being present in the real world is something an online competitor can't easily copy.

Now something fun: let's apply this to the previous The Build Brief ideas

The newsletter ad network becomes an ad network for town hall bulletins, local associations and small local newspapers, which have readers but zero idea how to monetize them.
The AI A/B testing tool becomes a version made for small artisans selling on Shopify or Etsy, without any jargon, where the AI just tells them "change this photo, you'll sell more".
The software suite becomes a suite of tiny tools for amateur sports clubs: memberships, schedules, communication with parents, all under one cheap subscription.
The personal newsletter assistant becomes a family newsletter for grandparents who aren't on social media, where kids and grandkids send photos and the AI turns them into a printed gazette every month. Famileo is doing exactly this in France and it works really well btw!
The startup building game... I don't know for this one ahahah