SuuS

The world does not need another scheduling app. It doesn't need another identity management product, another logging tool, another HR platform, another workout tracker. Nobody wakes up excited to build these things. They exist because someone had to, not because anyone wanted to.

And yet — this is where most smart, technical people end up spending their careers. Building the digital plumbing for businesses that will forget their vendor's name the moment a cheaper option shows up.

I keep coming back to this question: if you're genuinely in the top fraction of a percent in terms of technical ability and ambition, why are you optimizing CRUD apps?

The argument for SaaS is obvious. Recurring revenue, low marginal cost, huge TAM if you pick the right niche. VCs love it. The playbook is well-documented. You can get to ramen profitability without leaving your apartment. All true. None of it addresses the real question, which is whether this is actually a good use of your finite time on earth.

There's a version of this argument that sounds like motivational poster nonsense, so let me be specific about what I mean. The problems worth working on are the ones where the solution changes the physical constraints of human life. Energy. Transportation. Bioengineering. Space infrastructure. Material science. The kinds of problems where "I don't know how to do this" is the starting condition for everyone involved, and that's fine, because the knowledge exists and the learning curve is the easy part.

Elon gets brought up in these conversations to the point of cliche, but the relevant fact is simple: when he started SpaceX, he didn't know how to build rockets. When he started Tesla, he wasn't an automotive engineer. He read, he hired, he figured it out. The barrier to deep tech isn't knowledge — it's the willingness to commit to something where the feedback loops are measured in years instead of sprint cycles.

That's the real difference. SaaS gives you dopamine hits: a new signup, an MRR milestone, a Product Hunt launch. Deep tech gives you silence for months, sometimes years, followed by something that actually matters. Most people can't tolerate that silence. If you can, you probably shouldn't be building a project management tool.

Think about what's actually scarce. Software engineers who can ship a web app are not scarce. The frameworks are mature, the deployment tooling is trivial, and AI is making the whole stack even more commoditized by the month. What's scarce is people who can think about hard physical problems and have the technical chops to make progress on them.

The future needs arcologies, not another Notion competitor. It needs orbital manufacturing, not another llm observability SaaS. It needs synthetic biology platforms that let us redesign our relationship with the natural world, not another CRM.

I realize this sounds grandiose. But look at it from the other direction: in 50 years, nobody will remember who built the best employee onboarding SaaS of 2026. The people working on fusion, on programmable matter, on extending human presence beyond Earth — that work compounds in a way that another B2B vertical play simply cannot.

None of this means SaaS is worthless or that the people building it are wasting their lives. Plenty of SaaS solves real problems for real people, and there's dignity in that. But if you're reading this and you feel that pull toward something bigger — if the phrase "moon colony" makes you lean forward instead of roll your eyes — then maybe the reason you haven't started isn't that you lack the skills. Maybe it's that you've been convinced the safe path is the smart path.

It isn't. Not for you.

The safe path is for people who want comfort. You want to build something that outlasts you. Those are different games with different rules, and you've been playing the wrong one.

Start.