Your playbook could be software

Owning a software company used to take a big cheque and a developer team. Start-ups spent years trying to break even, and by the time investors got their cut, the founders were left with scraps.

That is why building a software product was never on the table for most small business owners in Ireland or the UK.

AI has changed the numbers. Micro SaaS products, small niche tools with a few hundred paying customers, now run on near-zero debt. The build cost has dropped so far that almost every business owner should be asking what they could build.

A good software product depends on knowing a niche inside out. Most tech founders spend years and thousands trying to acquire that understanding.

You already have it. Years of experience, a method that gets results, and clients who pay for it. That knowledge is the asset a tech founder would spend years trying to build.

Start with your method. Write it down as a step-by-step playbook, the way you would hand it to a new team member. Then ask AI which part of that playbook could become a simple tool your clients would pay a small monthly fee to use.

I've started doing exactly this with parts of my own consulting process. The build cost with AI tooling is a fraction of what an agency would quote, and the first version can be live inside a month.

Most owners will hear about this and do nothing. The few who turn their expertise into a product end up with an asset that earns on its own.