Richard Sam

Windows close. I keep reminding myself of that lately.

I was around for the mobile era, when you could put an app in the store and people would actually find it. That lasted maybe four years before distribution got hard and the easy wins dried up. Right now feels like that again, but bigger. Building has never been this cheap or this fast.

The trap is mistaking the fun for the work. It's genuinely a blast watching a new model drop and shipping something with it the same night. But cheap building means everyone gets the same superpower, so what you point it at matters more than ever. The window for AI startup ideas nobody's served yet is open now, and it won't stay open.

That's the part I got tired of guessing at, so I built SoloVault to surface early market signals and turn them into things actually worth building.

Most "AI startups" I see are just a thin wrapper around someone else's model and someone else's platform. That feels fine right up until the terms change.

Here's the part people skip: if your whole product lives inside another company's ecosystem, you're not really building a business, you're farming a plot of land you don't own. They can raise the rent, close the API, or ship your feature themselves. You did the work, they keep the leverage.

The thing that's actually yours is the wedge knowing a specific market well enough to spot a problem before it's obvious, and owning the relationship with those users. The model underneath gets cheaper and more replaceable every month. The insight doesn't.

That's the part I keep trying to make easier with SoloVault: surfacing early market signals and turning them into concrete things to build, so you point your effort at a real gap instead of a fragile dependency.

Right now every assistant you use keeps its own private notebook on you, and you can't take it anywhere. Switch tools and you start from zero. That feels backwards. The most valuable thing in the whole stack isn't the model, it's the accumulated context about who you are and what you're working on.

I think portable memory becomes a real fight in the next couple of years, and that fight opens a gap. Whoever lets people own and carry their context across platforms is sitting on something durable, not just another wrapper.

That's the kind of shift I keep poking at. I built SoloVault to surface these early market signals and turn them into concrete things a solo maker could actually ship, so you spend your time deciding what's worth building instead of guessing.

https://solovault.info/