In January of this year, I watched a podcast with Amjad Masad, the founder of Replit, and came away convinced that building a successful SaaS had become accessible to everyone, especially with the buzz around CAL AI, the app built by 19 year old Zach Yadegari and sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, an app that was fully vibe coded.
I started acting on my ideas, moving between them, and it took months before I shipped my first platform, which I launched as Mawq3i, an e-commerce platform built specifically for the Palestinian market. I worked with numerous companies to connect payment gateways, delivery providers, and countless other details, and I assumed the product would sell itself, since it was clearly the strongest, easiest, most efficient, and fastest option in the market. Competitors' stores looked more like a calculator by comparison. Then we started cold calling, my team and I, and every business owner we spoke to showed genuine interest and real admiration for the platform and the stores we were building, the difference was obvious the moment they compared. And yet most of them said the same thing: they wanted a store, but not right now, maybe in a few months, or they'd point to the economic slowdown caused by the escalation in the West Bank. Eventually I realized that the product I had built, the one I had spent everything I owned on, was nice to have, not more, for people here.
I shut down Mawq3i, a product I believed fit squarely into build something people want, but the truth is you never really know if people want something until you launch it and put it in front of them. I had never run a store myself, never experienced the problem firsthand, and never once heard someone else complain about it either. It was all assumption.
The truth is, I fell in love with building companies and SaaS products. I was putting in 10 to 12 hours a day on that project without ever getting bored, obsessing over the user experience down to the smallest detail. So naturally, I wasn't going to stop there, I moved straight into my second project. This time, though, I carried the lessons from my mistakes with me.
Editly AI is my new product, an AI video editor I've been building over the past few months. It's a problem I solve for my freelance clients personally: video editing. It's a problem I've watched people around me run into again and again, saying things like "I tried to get into X, but video editing was what stopped me." It's a problem that still hasn't been made simple, still hasn't been properly solved, most people cobble together a solution through workarounds with Claude and similar tools, with no dedicated platform actually built for it. I believe the market here is large, and there's a real opportunity for a unicorn. This time the target market is global, not local, which might sound strange coming from me, since I never really understood the local market or found a way to make money in it to begin with. The product is set to launch around October, and there'll be plenty to talk about between now and then.
I think my own experience answers the question this article is asking. The opportunity has undoubtedly grown. AI has solved part of the challenge of building a successful product. But writing the code was never the only challenge, or even the most important one. There have always been other challenges too, like demand, which is exactly what tripped up my own story. But in my view, marketing has always been, and will remain, the biggest challenge in building anything successful. Thousands of SaaS products launch every single day, and if you don't have an answer to the marketing challenge from day one, you'll end up like the thousands of products that die every single day.
Osama.
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