The "just build it with Claude" paradox
There’s a weird paradigm right now where people don’t value their own time anywhere close to what it’s actually worth. This has always been true to a degree, but AI seems to have pushed it into overdrive.
I keep running into “why can’t I just build this with Claude?”
And it’s like… yeah, you probably can? I’ve put ~100 hours into getting an MVP working and trying to market it at around 30-50 bucks a month. Then I’ll talk to someone making 100 an hour and they go, “yeah this is a good idea but I’ll just hack this together in a few weeks with Claude and n8n”
Lets say on the low side for their specific use case they spend ~10 hours. That’s $1k of their time to avoid paying 30 bucks a month.
On paper that makes zero sense. But it keeps happening. The Claude sub is already paid for, so the output feels free. Meanwhile paying for a product, even a cheap one, feels like a real decision.
So you get this weird outcome where people will happily spend way more in time to avoid spending a tiny bit of money.
Everyone keeps telling me to focus on real pain points. The thing is, the pain I’m solving is real. People just want to solve it themselves. That always made sense in enterprise b2b space when you have an engineering team and there are more tradeoffs than just time vs money for build vs buy. But now I’m seeing founders and consumers do the same thing, and I’ve never seen people treat their own time as this expendable.
Not sure what to do with that yet. Curious if others are seeing the same thing.