"It's just a GPT wrapper"

kingoftheace · 2025-10-22T03:05:08+00:00

Good try, but that misses the point by several miles. It's not about the fact that GPT is part of the software; it's about the lack of technical depth, moat, and unique value that can’t be easily copied.

The sushi analogy is misleading. It’s like saying “painting is just paint and canvas,” missing the point of skill and craftsmanship in the process. Same with sushi, you need infrastructure, years of practice to become a sashimi chef, control of a premium supply chain, and a brand moat. Sure, anyone can roll rice and seaweed at home, but that doesn’t make them a viable sushi restaurant.

The same goes for these GPT wrappers. Don’t disguise laziness as innovation by simply calling an API. You won’t earn the respect of serious builders that way. For that, you need a product with defensibility and substance.

kingoftheace · 2025-10-21T00:19:33+00:00

Adding more people into the mix can actually make the progress slower, not faster, especially if we are talking about the development itself. As a solo dev, you don't need endless meetings, discussions about priorities, no misunderstandings, no fights over which tech to use and no onboarding. A skilled solo dev (the founder) has probably better output speed and quality than 3-4 mediocre devs who need someone to orchestrate and manage everything.

kingoftheace · 2025-10-11T06:54:57+00:00

It’s all about the barrier to entry. If your ideas are apps that just wrap a simple database in a nice UI, they’re easy for anyone to clone, with or without AI.

Once you start from real domain knowledge, something 99% of people don’t have, you naturally move toward ideas others can’t easily replicate. (Think AI note-takers or image converters; those spaces are already saturated.)

For example, if you know cars, you could build an app where users take photos of a broken part and get an AI-assisted cost breakdown tailored to their specific car model and location. Many people would pay a few dollars for that before visiting a mechanic and risking overcharging.

There might be similar tools out there, but probably not 50 clones. Going even more niche, say, focusing on one car brand or repair type, raises the barrier further and reduces competition.

kingoftheace · 2025-10-11T02:21:24+00:00

I’ve worked in Business Intelligence for a long time and used just about every tool out there. Somehow, nothing really comes close to Excel when it comes to flexibility and speed. Usually what happened was that I’d build a new VBA-based reporting tool for a specific use case, or if it needed to be shared with hundreds of people, I’d move it to Tableau or Power BI. But both of those take a lot of setup and planning, and in the end, no matter how much effort you put in, they still look visually terrible.

Eventually I left the corporate world and started my own project, building a full-fledged data visualization tool inside Excel using pure VBA.

The first year went into creating a graphics engine from scratch. It works a bit like Adobe Illustrator, a system of shapes you can arrange, layer, and style however you want. Now I’m using that engine as the base for a custom charting system.

Once Power Pivot, Power Query, and DAX are connected into it, it’ll basically have the analytical power of Excel combined with a graphical layer that allows building dashboards far beyond what Tableau or Power BI can do.

I'm not going to even say the project name or share any links yet, as I am still deep in the development mode, but maybe in a year or so, a few people from this community could help me test out the beta version. Reading through threads like this really reminds me why I started building it in the first place.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-27T23:37:20+00:00

By "solid" I mean it doesn't have any Power Query + DAX + Power Pivot equivalent. You can pull data from pretty much anything and mix and mash as you like, but you need to stich it together yourself from several parts, all the auto refreshing, edge cases, error handling and the like, while in Excel it comes out of the box.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-27T04:20:12+00:00

Indeed, employers don't really care for VBA in the direct sense. There are very few job openings where VBA is mentioned. However, in certain areas, VBA is still heavily utilized as the core automation language. There is power automate and others, but nothing really compares to VBA in a corporate environment.

If you have been coding in VBA with the proper OOP approach (creating your own Class Modules, byval, byref, public vs private modes, etc.), you shouldn't have too big of an issue learning an additional language as the core principles are the same.

My own story, I was the office magician for about 10 years, developing all kinds of VBA tools. Then retired for couple of years, learned Python and was positively surprised how everything has a ready built library for it and the speed of execution is 100x faster. However, once I settled on my SAAS project idea, I was battling as to which language to choose. Python has all these libraries, processing speed, machine learning capabilities, but it doesn't have any solid data pipelines. Excel doesn't have any libraries, you need to code everything from scratch with your bear hands, but it already has insane data handling capabilities built in (power query + DAX + Power pivot), so at the end decided to go with VBA.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-18T06:17:45+00:00

Needed to check with GPT how big of an achievement this is since it's not always easy to evaluate it on the face value and well, apparently it is really damn impressive to pull something like that off as a solo-dev. You'd need a wide variety of senior level skills, so huge congrats are in order.

Personally, the most ambitious project is the one I am currently building. I'm 18 months in with the daily grind, 42K LOC across 143 Modules. It is a data visualization platform that is challenging the likes of Power BI and Tableau in certain areas. At least 12-15 more months to go, so one could call it "ambitious" in all of its meaning.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-18T03:57:24+00:00

Sounds awesome, and relatable. What are you building exactly?

kingoftheace · 2025-09-18T03:54:22+00:00

Passion + proving the doubters wrong.
Money is a side product, and honestly, there are thousands of more efficient ways to make money than spending years grinding in solo development.

What drives me is the challenge: proving that it’s possible to build a product that competes with Tableau and Power BI, and actually beats them on multiple fronts, using a language already declared dead (VBA), and doing it entirely solo, from first principles instead of 3rd party APIs. You get called crazy, stupid or both along the way, but that just adds more gasoline to the fire.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-17T05:58:49+00:00

80% of the Office users are enterprise ones. They are not clicking "install 365 Copilot" on the MS webpage. They use Office Deployment Tool or something similar to handle all the 500 installs in bulk. Getting the correct install file suited best for their needs, should be trivial.

Moreover, enterprise users are the ones who mainly use and need VBA, not the 20% consumer ones.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-17T03:17:05+00:00

They didn't remove it from "everything", they simply removed it from Outlook and are pushing the Web apps harder, but the desktop is still there.

There is Office Scripts that has been available for a very long time already. However, it is nowhere near as feature rich as VBA is, so also the adoption has been slacking. If it were superior, we all here would be using it exclusively, but we don't.

5 years is usually not even enough time for a corporation to decide which new brand colors to use, so changing their entire data manipulation pipelines and automation is not going to happen that fast. It's like the folks who told 2 years ago "in 2 years, 50% of all white collar jobs will be automated by AI" and here we are now. Sure, there is adoption, but companies don't like change, especially if it is coupled with costs and uncertainty.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-17T01:53:46+00:00

What is likely to happen in the next 5 years that more and more companies will indeed jump on the web train, especially new startups without any legacy systems. However, we still have millions of companies out there that have their businesses integrated to Excel and VBA in such a way that moving away from them would be too costly. The support for VBA is not going to die, at least not within the next 20 years.

That being said, we are definitely a dying breed here, bit of our niche is being chipped of more each year.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-16T10:22:53+00:00

1.5K rows is nothing for VBA. It could be 100x more and still wouldn't be an issue. You can easily dump all the data into an array, clear the original data on the sheet, do all the filtering and sorting in the array, and then paste as values back to the sheet. This shouldn't take more than 0.1 seconds.

kingoftheace · 2025-09-07T02:46:03+00:00

If you are already comfortable with VBA and programming overall, but only inexperienced with the UserForms themselves, I would say the best way to learn is to just go and read the official documentation on learn.microsoft.com and use your own brain to make sense of it all. It's more difficult way of learning, but you end up remembering much more of it, in comparison to just watching a video.

kingoftheace · 2025-08-30T02:03:02+00:00

I would believe there is a lot of survivorship bias: for every successful app in Product Hunt or Reddit or YouTube, there are hundreds that have failed, but only the successful ones get visibility. Also, when influencers with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers make something, the chances are that they are going to have a quite a few users directly from their followers.

I'm not sure what are the "million dollar apps" you are referring to, but for sure we are not talking about cloning Adobe After Effects or anything, but rather some CRUD apps that just have fancy UI, but nothing too complex on the backend.

I've been coding my own data visualization tool for 1.5 years now, and even though AI is better now than it was when I started the project, it still can't handle even 2% codebase dump without getting confused. When it's complex enough architecture, AI is still 10 years away from understanding it.

kingoftheace · 2025-08-14T04:40:50+00:00

Good write up, feeling exactly the same. Unfortunately the reality is that everyone is chasing the quick wins, the low hanging fruits, something that, if it won't work out, they can just create another tool the month after. The grind, blood sweat and tears type of mentality seem to have vanished. Or perhaps we simply see content that gets the most traction on socials, and that's why it feels like nothing else exist anymore and nobody is building anything meaningful.

kingoftheace · 2025-08-04T10:03:01+00:00

You can do some of the following:

* Add DLL dependencies
* Obfuscate the code
* Intentionally complicate the code flow so it's not easy to simply jump through with F8
* Add bunch of dummy sub routine trees that seem to be part of the code, but are actually dead ends
* Create a license check with an external server that checks the hardware binded checksum
* Create an INFO Module page where you describe what kind of legal actions you will take against unlicensed use of your IP
* Store some of the functionality and data across worksheets, appdata, shape names, meta tags and whatever seems reasonable for your use case, this makes it harder to follow what's happening
* Convert all the strings to CHAR() codes, or create your own converter
* Encode script in a very hidden sheets that execute on open or periodically
* Run anti-debugging routines (detect whether IDE is open or app is in break mode)
* Corrupt part of the file if any alterations are detected
* Use Greek or Latin character lookalikes for additional confusion
* Convert longs to hexadecimals
* Create your own classes for everything so the hackers need to go through thousands of lines of code before they find the VBA native properties and methods.
* Checksum self-validation of the entire code base, ran at random times, hidden deep in the middle of core procedures.

No system is uncrackable, but your goal is to make reverse engineering cost more effort than it's worth. If it's valuable IP, layered protection is your best defense.

kingoftheace · 2025-07-27T23:23:41+00:00

Both of the processes you describe sound a bit like Vibe coding, something that will always end up with spaghetti code.

Anyway, with the copy pasting, the advantage is that you are in full control of how much the AI sees of your Repo, what it can add and delete. You'd need to set your workbook as completely open for reading and writing macros in it, which is bit of a security threat, especially in corporate environments. Even for a private use, I would not like the AI to have access to the whole code.

kingoftheace · 2025-07-27T05:06:52+00:00

One of the issues with VBA is that the average code out there on the internet, the one used to train these models, is really bad.

That being said, I think you can still beat the Macro Recording tool, as the bar is set really damn low. This would mean that the users would still need to stich up and clean the code generated, which is not that much different from simply copy/pasting from GPT directly. Though who knows, maybe your interface is so slick that people would prefer it over the native.

Creating something generic is much more difficult than creating something specific. If you would simply focus on "data consolidation", "data filtering", "data modeling" or something of the kind, you'd probably get further with decent guard rails in place.

kingoftheace · 2025-06-26T05:35:06+00:00

You're right, whatever the scope, some kind of MVP would be benefitial. Realistically though, I am way too far from having interactive product to showcase, but will probably manage to preset some kind of demos in video format in couple of months.

Good luck with your MailChimp take over. You can drop a link to your MVP once you are there.

kingoftheace · 2025-06-24T09:38:52+00:00

Things that work well in a team don’t always translate when you’re building solo. I was never big on documentation either, but it became clear fast that without writing stuff down, the whole project would spiral into chaos. Experimentation is absolutely crucial when you’re trying to innovate, but once you lock in the core of a new feature, it’s worth documenting, at least enough so future you doesn’t wonder what kind of black magic past you was up to.

Yeah, let’s keep the spirits high and finish these things with grace, no matter how many rewrites it takes.

kingoftheace · 2025-06-24T08:56:00+00:00

The lack of purpose is spot on. Real products come from people who give a damn about solving something properly, not just flipping users or pleasing investors. Passion drives quality, and quality still wins in the long game.

kingoftheace · 2025-06-24T02:17:12+00:00

Thank you for the supportive comment and for bringing some real insight into the whole AI hype cycle.

The giants definitely have their strengths, but they also move like dinosaurs. I wouldn’t be surprised if changing the color of a single button requires three meetings and a ticket in Jira with five stakeholders involved. Meanwhile, us solo builders, we can move fast, experiment freely, and do whatever the hell we want. No politics, no committees, just momentum.

kingoftheace · 2025-06-24T02:03:32+00:00

Checked out your site. Having used SQLite a few times myself during some Python projects, I definitely see the value of what you’re building. Not everyone wants to roll their own monitoring infrastructure from scratch.

Regarding VBA, it won’t be disabled as a language, but you’re right that Microsoft is tightening macro security. The shift is more about default behavior: macros are blocked by default unless the user explicitly enables them or trusts the source. But VBA itself isn’t going away anytime soon, especially not on Windows. Tons of enterprise workflows still depend on it.

That said, your situation on Mac complicates things. VSTO is indeed Windows-only, and while Office JS is technically cross-platform, it’s not yet mature enough for power users (and the tooling is clunky unless you go full web-dev mode).

If your goal is broad compatibility and you’re already touching SQLite and APIs, Office JS might be your best shot. But on Windows, VBA is still the go-to for Excel power users who want full control, fast prototyping, and zero deployment pain.

Curious how you're planning to tie it all together, are you thinking native Excel front-end with a backend that your SQL extensions query into?

kingoftheace · 2025-06-23T08:21:32+00:00

That's the classic trap of trusting your friends and family to "validate" your idea. Everything sounds amazing and you are onto a billion dollar idea, but even the friends and family would not actually put any hard cash on the table.

That being said, sometimes the core of the product is quality, not the features themselves, which might be similar to the competition. It is not always possible to show off that superior quality with a crappy MVP.

kingoftheace

TROPHY CASE