Everyone's Building SaaS for SaaS. We're Betting on the Trades.

The builder bubble is real, and it's incestuous

Walk any launch feed and you'll see the same product five hundred times: a tool for founders, by founders, sold to founders. Dev tooling. AI agents that orchestrate other AI agents. Yet another analytics layer for a market that already has more analytics than data worth analyzing. The audience for "software for people who make software" is loud, online, and easy to reach — which is exactly why it's the most overserved market in technology.

This isn't a moral complaint. It's a competitive one. When every builder targets the same builder-shaped customer, you get a knife fight over a flat demand curve. Differentiation collapses, CAC rises, and the only people who reliably make money are the ones selling tools to the people fighting the knife fight.

The thesis is simple and contrarian: the builder-tools market is the worst place to be precisely because it's the easiest one to enter. The opportunity is wherever the builders aren't looking — and right now, that's the physical economy.

Necessary admission before we get preachy: Panegains is a SaaS — made by builders, sold to builders. We are, at this exact moment, the thing this post is side-eyeing. Oops. We're not pretending the call's coming from outside the house; we live in it. The bet isn't that we're above the pile — it's that we point the same shovel at ground nobody else is digging.

The cultural marker: even Jensen Huang is pointing at the trades

You don't have to take a research tool's word that the physical economy is heating up. Take Nvidia's. Addressing Carnegie Mellon's class of 2026, Jensen Huang told graduates: "Electricians, plumbers, iron workers, technicians, builders — this is your time" (Fortune, May 11, 2026). Earlier he was specific about why: the AI data-center buildout needs people to physically build it, and "we're talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories" (CNBC, January 22, 2026). A March 2026 Randstad analysis of several million job postings found skilled-trades demand up 27% over three years — construction +30%, welders +25%, electricians +18% (Randstad, via Fortune, May 2026).

Note what he actually said — six-figure salaries, not "millionaires." The point isn't lottery winnings. It's a structural demand shock: capital and labor flooding into electrical work, construction, HVAC, and skilled trades to physically build the AI economy. When the CEO most synonymous with the AI boom tells graduates the money's in the trades, that's a market signal.

Why the physical economy is the better hunting ground

• Fragmentation, not consolidation. Trades, field service, and regional logistics are thousands of small operators with no dominant vendor — the opposite of builder-tools, where three companies own each category.
• Real budgets, dull problems. A roofing contractor losing a day a week to scheduling chaos has money and a concrete pain. Dull, expensive problems are the durable ones.
• Less competition for attention. The builder-tools feed is saturated. The "software for HVAC dispatch" conversation is not.
• The capital is arriving now. Demand for software tends to follow capital into a sector, not lead it.

The catch: builders can't see these problems from where they sit. The pain lives in trade subreddits, niche forums, and supplier complaint threads where electricians, dispatchers, and shop owners actually talk — specific, recurring, and almost completely unwatched by people who can build.

When building is cheap, knowing what to build is the moat

AI collapsed the cost of building software. The bottleneck moved upstream: from "can you build it" to "should you, and for whom." The scarce skill isn't engineering — it's demand discovery in places nobody else is looking. That's the entire reason a tool like ours points at Reddit, Hacker News, and the open web instead of the launch feeds everyone already reads. Bottom-up pain intelligence beats top-down market guesswork — especially when the market is one your peers never thought to watch.

The takeaway

Everyone's building SaaS for SaaS because it's the market they can see from their desk. That's exactly why it's the wrong one. The capital, the labor, and the unsolved problems are moving into the physical economy — and almost no one with the ability to build software is watching that pain.

When the build is free, the edge is the aim. Point it somewhere your competitors aren't looking, and you've already won most of the fight.