Who will it be?
At FIBO Global Fitness over the last few days, that question has been quietly sitting in the background.
Not just there, but across almost every vertical market right now.
Because it’s coming.
The moment where someone arrives with a product that promises everything… but has been hastily stitched together by an outsourced dev team and a few thousand Claude Code tokens.
Much like the SIM cards in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Free. Irresistible. Adopted at scale.
And only later… revealed for what they really are.
How many adopters will it snare before the proof is truly pudding’d?
We are an industry ripe for it.
A huge global audience. And a software landscape where many legacy players have become little more than UI’s to payment processors.
For many, innovation didn’t slow down – it stopped. Replaced by marketing drive… and the need for more $$$.
My gut feeling?
It won’t be a big tech disruptor.
It’ll be one of the dabblers.
An industry mentor or consultant* with no technical foundation – but an idea.
Until now, their ambition has been capped by budget and outsourced dev constraints. Their previous attempts barely made a ripple.
But now?
“An app” can be spun up in a matter of days.
And that changes behaviour.
It will launch cheaply. Unfeasibly cheap.
Because the real costs – proper architecture, scalability, security, support – haven’t been felt yet.
At first, it will look great.
Because AI code often does.
Until it doesn’t.
Then the cracks appear.
Not all at once. Just enough to ignore.
Privacy issues. Security gaps. Unpredictable billing. Members charged twice… or not at all.
Support queries with no real answers – because nobody truly understands how it works.
And then it tips.
A dormant edge case. A missed condition. Something small.
Until suddenly, the system is a runaway process… eating through resources.
Or worse – quietly multiplying behind the scenes until someone triggers the software equivalent of a fork bomb.
From there, it’s patchwork.
Add-ons. Fixes. Rewrites.
None of it quite fits together – because rebuilding properly means re-tokenising everything… and the cost suddenly becomes very real.
For vendors already sitting on large investments and struggling to make the math math… this is where things get uncomfortable.
Very quickly.
Investors get nervous. Confidence drops. And the culling begins.
As a company, we’ve taken a different path.
No external investment.
That comes with downsides – but it also forces discipline.
It keeps you lean. Focused. And honest about what it really takes to build and support a professional system.
Would a “magic beans” product hurt?
Of course.
But at best, it replicates what already exists.
And then it has to catch up with everything else that sits behind it.
I’m a fan of AI.
But I’m also a technical user.
And that means understanding both what it can do… and where it breaks.
If anything, the pace is accelerating.
When Nvidia says it can turn a 10-month engineering task into an overnight job, this isn’t just about software anymore.
It’s about how quickly things can be built…
…versus how long they actually stand up in the real world.
And that gap?
That’s where the next Trojan horse lives.
* Before I offend every consultant, the usual “not all gurus” disclaimer applies.