Put your energy there, the rest will become cheap anyway.

Software used to cost a fortune. We spent six digits and years of time to build ours. Today someone can make something that looks like it in a weekend. So what is the real value of a software business now? I went looking in history, because this is not the first time making something became cheap.

Books. I did a research on this and thought this might be interesing: before the printing press one monk copied one Bible in about a year. A Bible cost three years of salary. Then Gutenberg came and printing a book became hundreds of times cheaper (Johannes Gutenberg was a 15th-century German inventor who introduced movable-type printing to Europe around 1450. His printing press made books far quicker and cheaper to produce, helping knowledge spread widely.). Interesting part - the price of a book did not fall hundreds of times. It fell maybe by two thirds. Who took the difference? Not Gutenberg. He lost his press to the man who lent him money. The money went to the people who owned the printing houses and the shops that sold the books.

Then the flood. Everyone printed everything. Scholars complained the new books were full of mistakes and rubbish. They were right. It did not matter.

Same with music after Spotify - 88% of songs there never earned a cent. Same with photos after smartphones - Kodak went bankrupt the same year Instagram was sold for a billion dollars with 13 people. Same with websites after Shopify. And now the same with software.

Every time the script/pattern is similar, four steps.
1. Making gets cheap.
2. Then everyone makes and most of it earns nothing.
3. Then whoever owns the door to the customer takes the money - Amazon, Spotify, App Store.
4. And then the value moves to what cannot be copied - knowing what to build, carrying the risk when something goes wrong, keeping it working for years, and the relationship with the client.

Let's call it - the Gutenberg Cycle. He was the first who lived through it and lost.

A good entrepreneur can learn from the mistakes and innovations of the past. This helps them prepare for change, understand where to go next, and make better decisions. For me it was a bit humbling. Our code was never the moat. I was always saying that we are selling the algorithms, and I am this algorithm man who loves to solve and have something valuable and useful, and from one point of view it is what we sell - we can give you API access to the algorithms, or you can use our software or apps, whatever. But the moat is 15 years in that industry we know so well - knowing how a retailer thinks, since I was one, what are the pain points and what just sounds like it is, what sells and what doesn't, what breaks and which mistake could costs you money. Nobody can prompt, vibecode or guess that. At least - not yet, or did I miss something?

Simple test you can do today that worked well for me: write down everything you sell, works for both: services and products. Cross out what a stranger could copy with AI in a weekend, and what is left is your real business. Put your energy there, the rest will become cheap anyway.

What is left on your list?