Everything is a wrapper of a wrapper of a wrapper
I used to dislike building UI wrapper apps... but I was wrong.
I used to frown upon building UI wrapper apps of shiny new tech (erhem, like OpenAi). I thought I had many ‘good reasons’ to dislike it:
No competitive moat, as wrappers can be made/cloned easily
Platform risk of being ‘sherlocked’ by the platform providing the API
Just jumping on bandwagon, mindlessly following what’s fashionable for the day
There’s no long term play. It’s just a short term land grab.
It’s lame. One must have standards.
But I’m realised that I might have been leaning a little over on the side of elitist/purist self-righteousness from my dislike. Slowly coming round to the idea… that there’s nothing wrong with building wrappers.
Everything is a wrapper of a wrapper, anyway.
Heroku is a wrapper for AWS.
Lemon Squeezy is a wrapper for Stripe.
Namecheap is a wrapper for ICANN.
Nuxt.js is a wrapper for Vue.js.
Vue.js is a wrapper for Javascript.
Javascript is a wrapper for Java/C…
It’s wrappers all the way down.
Besides, if someone’s willing to buy, wrapper be damned. One man’s ‘wrapper’ is another man’s lifesaver for all we know.
If it works it works.
If it sells it sells.
Money is money is money.
Even if it’s just a short term opportunity, it’s still money. No one said you should only build things that last decades.
More counter-arguments I can think of:
Yes, maybe there’s no competitive moat but maybe the pie’s big enough for everyone. If it doesn’t fly, I still learned something new building it.
Just because Microsoft/OpenAi/Google is going to build it isn’t a good excuse to not even try. They have their own target market, I have mine. Both can co-exist. For example, everyone uses Google Analytics but it sucks. My indie analytics options are actually doing really well and offer way better features.
Ok so what if it’s bandwagon? I won’t do it because everyone is doing it? Smells like ego to me, or rebel without a cause. Do I want to be making some quick profit and laughing my way to the bank, than sit on my moral high horse and tell myself I’m ‘different’ because I don’t follow the crowd? Utility > vanity.
Yes it might very well be just a short term land grab, like in the case of AI avatars, but there’s no rule saying that we should only build long term, sustainable businesses. Why not both? Have a long term play, but occasionally bet on a short term opportunity.
Re: one must have standards… 99% of all apps/sites just do 4 things - create, read, update, delete. What standards?!
There are NO RULES.
Only my own self-limiting beliefs.
Great piece mate!