Yesterday I talked about 99% of the world is transitioning from software users to software creators. As everyday software consumers, it’s a little hard to picture how we’ll be on the creator side of it. As farfetched as it may seem, we have seen similar movements throughout history. Movements that shaped humankind for good. Let’s take a look at some of them:
- Everyone is a publisher
You can go back to the invention on the printing press back in 1440, which allowed our civilization to share knowledge quickly. Gutenberg’s printing press opened the way for mass production (leading to mass distribution) of knowledge. You can also fast forward to the modern world, where any can create a blog online, for free. - Everyone is a movie director
Whether it is filming your life or directing a short, we can all: record video, edit it with software in your computer, and distribute it online for free. YouTubers are making careers out of this. An acclaimed movie director, Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky) shot two of his movies entirely on his iPhone just to prove the point that movie production is democratized. - Everyone is a music producer
There was a time when you needed connections with labels as well as access (and money) for studio time to get your music out there. Or hope a big shot producer would catch one of your gigs. Compare that to today, where you can use software to produce music and distribute it for free on YouTube or SoundCloud. The Arctic Monkeys, Justin Bieber, and Billie Eillish (among many others) owe their success to the democratization of music production and distribution.
Democratization = Massive Creative Explosion
The trend above is clear. Democratization in a space is enabled by lowering the barrier to tools of creation (and distribution). More people go for it. More people define the mainstream. People that were never before involved in movies, music, or tech can transition into directors, musicians, and tech entrepreneurs.
There is no downside or opportunity cost. You can turn your vision into a working app on Bubble, Adalo, or Glide. Build internal tools for your business with Airtable, Coda, or Internal. Build and publish websites on Webflow or Studio. All on your own! The companies mentioned above are just a small representation of the wave of no-code and low-code tools that are powering creation and entrepreneurship.
“As creating things on the internet becomes more accessible, more people will become makers. It’s no longer limited to the <1% of engineers that can code resulting in an explosion of ideas from all kinds of people.”
— Ryan Hoover (founder of Product Hunt) on “The Rise of No Code”
So, please, go ahead and create an app to share movies with your friends, a private Instagram, an inventory app for your café, a bot for your ecommerce store, a custom CRM and sales tracker, a YouTube production management tool, a dynamic content calendar… if you can picture it, you can build it.
So, what will you build?
A.
