# Niche expertise can become a small software business Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/niche-expertise-can-become-a-small-software-business/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Amjad Masad](https://realalpha.app/builders/amjad-masad/) · Amjad Masad is founder and CEO of Replit. · Co-founded and leads Replit, a browser-based coding platform letting anyone write and deploy code. - Host: [Reid Hoffman](https://realalpha.app/people/reid-hoffman/) · Co-founder, Manas AI · Co-founded LinkedIn; one of OpenAI's first investors; Greylock partner. - Host: Aria Finger - Show: Possible - Episode: [Amjad Masad on vibe coding, AI agents, and the end of boilerplate](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/), Jan 7, 2026 - Moment: 24:55 to 28:41 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/niche-expertise-can-become-a-small-software-business/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1495 ## Quote > “everyone has **domain knowledge in their head** that is not monetized just yet.” > — [Amjad Masad](https://realalpha.app/builders/amjad-masad/) at [26:11](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1571) · Possible ## Takeaways 1. Domain knowledge can reveal problems that broad software misses. 2. Lower development costs let more people test niche business ideas. 3. Local businesses need not fit one-size-fits-all SaaS products. ## About this segment Amjad Masad says people hold unmonetized knowledge of niche problems. He points to a platform for pop-up yoga events, showing how software can serve local markets. From “Amjad Masad on vibe coding, AI agents, and the end of boilerplate”, Jan 7, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [25:01](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1501) Is it, oh, 80% of people are building whatever, SaaS software? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think most of it is AI software, which is why we built this recent thing. It used to be that you have to go figure out how to get an API key from OpenAI or others. But people have AI ideas. Like they see AI and like a lot of people will be like, oh, I wish Chachipichi did this one thing, right? and then they want to build AI experiences like chatbots like Read AI is a great example obviously Read AI is very advanced in that it has video and all of that but you can build like you know Amjad AI like go like tell Replit to like go look at your personal blog or place in your notes and just say I want to create a chat experience that sounds like me based on these notes and so AI is a really big one another one is like people want to build businesses [25:51](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1551) and this is you know as i started thinking about our business more there's two aspects of our business i would say maybe three there is the uh consumer aspect which is you know building family stuff and building personal things and then there's the enterprise which is like automating things at work line of business applications you know rapid prototyping product development inside businesses larger businesses and then entrepreneurs and the way i started thinking about entrepreneurs is that everyone has domain knowledge in their head that is not monetized just yet. Similar to how, you know, Airbnb found that everyone has space in the room that's not monetized. There are people all over the world that have niche specific problems that they've run into that no one else has solved. [26:37](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1597) I was talking to an entrepreneur on Repli the other day. His wife is a yoga teacher in rural England. And she does these pop-up yoga events. And most of the communication is happening over WhatsApp. Payment is really hard to do. They use PayPal, all these different things. And so he wanted to build a platform for her, but other people like her. So she doesn't have a yoga studio that you can go to every day, but she does these events at backyards and things like that. So he's built a platform and he has users and he has other instructors. And so every niche in our life, there are people that are experts and that previously were not entrepreneurs because they didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go pay developers to do it. Now they can do it. [27:19](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1639) I love that example because obviously there's entrepreneurs that you're serving that are building, you know, million dollar, billion dollar businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers. But I think that like solopreneur, the woman who has a yoga studio, like I think of my mom, who's a piano teacher and she's always trying to figure out how do I get my schedule straight? [27:39](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1659) How do I get payment? How do I figure this out? And so there's so many, like she's an entrepreneur, the person who runs a yoga studio, the person who has like a bakery outside their house. Like those are the people who would never be able to afford fancy coders, a fancy website, but Replit can empower them to do so much more. So I love that. And there's something about it that makes me really excited about the world. [28:01](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1681) As much as I love Silicon Valley, we tend to flatten the world. We just like build one size fit all. And that means like, you know, SaaS software tends to have all these buttons and configuration just to fit every use case. But instead, we're going to explode that and decentralize it around the world. And every community might have a special business that does one specific niche thing. And that diversity, I think, is exciting. [28:25](https://realalpha.app/v/xPDQXfS_vTE/?t=1705) And as part of that diversity and being fun, we'd like to play for you a short clip of one of the ways people have used Replit to build something important to them.