Why do calendar apps and todo list apps make millions even though you have Google Calendar and Apple Reminders?
There are plenty of opportunities for building a good product even if the big platform copies you. For example in this case I can think of an easy differentiator: make it work with other agents and IDEs, not just Claude Code. Plenty of other ways to specialize by adding features not included in vanilla big company products.
Which calendar app makes millions exactly? If you’re talking Calendly, they had multiple years of headstart against Google (plus the pandemic boom). Basic calendaring apps don’t really make for VC-backable business.
That said, I don’t think that comparison makes sense anyway. The barrier of entry on AI apps (and by competitors cloning apps with AI) is enough these days that you can guarantee anything minimally viable will be cloned immediately.
Plus some of these features are quite literally the roadmap of OpenAI/Google/Anthropic. Competing with giants building the exact product they’re actively building rarely works. Anthropic isn’t “copying you” - they’re literally building this.
Doesn’t have to be VC backable. Todoist is the classic bootstrapped todo list app making north of $20 million a year. Fantastical for iOS and a lot of cute calendar apps make very good incomes for lifestyle business.
Sure Anthropic might have this on the roadmap and release next week. But apps like this can literally make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few weeks — well worth the effort for a few months work I would say.
Todoist is a huge outlier. They had an early mover advantage (it was one of the first mobile todo apps). A few other Todo players also managed to keep an audience, even after Apple and Google rolled their (still half baked in 2025) alternatives - multiple years later.
It’s a very, very different story.
I’m obviously not saying anyone should stop building apps or dismissing this or any other app from being potentially successful. It’s just a fundamentally different scenario than the early days of mobile, particularly for thin LLM wrappers
That's true. I wish I could make good memes or could sell shock-value crap like "cheat on everything" with a straight face... limiting my potential there
Codex already works from your phone, I imagine Anthropic is well on its way to ship Claude Code across devices/apps too..