This is actually really interesting to hear.

I always hear the argument "you don't need a fancy website or UI, when I started my site/app looked like ___"

These people created MVPs in 2010. You're now competing with MVPs that can be built with way more features, the latest tech stacks, and more in the same period of time.

This can proably be attributed to the barrier for entry for competition being so much lower , so the definition of an MVP has changed. And equally, expectations from end users have risen. Recent anecdotal example of this is the frenetic pace of development in the ML/AI space with opensource tools like Stable Diffusion practically almost rendering moot the business model of OpenAI’s DALLE-2.

To win out MVPs have to either be a value proposition currently not available that people need, or to win a popularity contest based on UX, design and branding. That there are still project management tools being developed and succeeding in a saturated market tells me that the popularity contest never really stops.

I also had a successful SAAS around that period while my later ones failed.

Start a SAAS in a new market, not an established one. Back then every market was wide open.

> the vast increase in regulations and liability around handling data,

Can you elaborate on this or give examples where these bigger hurdles than they used to be? I'm curious to know in what domains this is the case. I've no doubt that it is true, but my sense was that there are still large swaths of "internety" products that are entirely or mostly unregulated and where there isn't much to be said about how you handle data, but I could be wrong. I'd be very interested in any concrete examples you may have had in mind.

GDPR-like regulations certainly come to mind. Which is a good thing - too much unprotected data in one place is a disaster for all involved.

And that's one of the areas where there's a lot of innovation happening right now... for example, the push to decentralize identity ensures that businesses don't need to keep any data that is considered personal data under GDPR while still having provable "credentials" (things like proof of age, degree, medical records etc) needed to be provided with certain services. I won't link any particular businesses in this area, but a quick search should show there's a lot... and the European Commission is one of the leaders in pushing this: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...

Much of the clear low-hanging fruit are in automating or aggregating fragmented data in tech-neglected industries, and that often involves handling PII or payments data - which quickly exposes you to GDPR and equivalents in every country, for which there isn’t a obvious path to compliance (especially when considering that web tech trends go the opposite direction, like the trend toward edge computing = how do you satisfy data residency requirements? It gets complex fast).

Do you have any suggestions for Etsy seller communties? I have a friend who has a bunch of professional printing and cutting equipment, but the niche he sells in is very small - most of his business coming from word of mouth - and very seasonal. I feel he could be more successful expanding into slightly more main stream areas.

>I have a line of home decor that sells well enough

Seeing a pattern here, feels like an oversaturation of software and not enough physical assets to connect it to. Mostly people also get tired of shipping code all of the time. Thats why the naughty secret dream of a lot of devs is just to do a coffee shop or a non-automated bakery when retired :)