“It Depends” Might Save Us

I was typing away on what I planned to share with you today, a chat broke out in a WhatsApp group about the best web platform to use for someone’s portfolio site. To me, it pulled on the thread of what I was talking about last week in “Is the Vibe Killing SaaS”, so I thought I’d share this with you instead.

Of course, someone suggested Loveable and vibing this thing into life, someone countered with Claude to do the same thing, with the geeky detail of using Cloudflare with Sanity as a CMS. Others suggested Odoo, Squarespace, Framer, Wix, Webflow, Wordpress and even Carrd (which, as an aside, I’ve recently used on a project and is a pretty decent, inexpensive landing page builder).

Someone shared their experience that “Squarespace was a bit limiting”, but then someone else shared that “the shop feature is now included on basic”. Wix is apparently “fiddly”, Odoo was better than Loveable as it includes a basic CRM, and one of the group would not recommend Webflow “unless you are techy”.

It’s hard to know who is who in a large WhatsApp group, but I suspect there is a broad range of CMS and technical expertise, from novice to complete geek (looking at you Sanity/Cloudflare fella). But the conversation is a great example of the “enabled business user”, as now any of us can build a decent website; we don’t have the gatekeepers of designers, developers, and the geeks who understand how to keep the servers humming.

It has become, as they say, “democratised”.

Aside from Odoo, I’ve either used all of the tools suggested in live projects, or dabbled and tried them out for something, and more tools besides, as I sadly love that sort of thing, but while this experience might be useful, I haven’t commented yet.

I think it’s because I don’t want to be the dull, killjoy who pulls out a pen from their pocket protector, adjusts their milk bottle bottom glasses and speaking through their adenoids, says….

“It depends”.

Of course, it’s a Whatsapp group, so they can’t see my pocket protector, glasses or especially my adenoids.

It’s a nice group, so nothing against this chat. I also saw a similar conversation in a CMO group about managing enterprise digital assets. The group, like a lot of us do in marketing, has dived into the tools, nobody has asked:

“What do you want to do?”

Do they need a shop?

A simple landing page?

A blog?

Newsletter?

Yeah….

Pesky requirements.

I mentioned at the top that this pulls on a similar thread to last week’s post.

In that post, I talked about how when we vibe code an application into existence, we are then responsible for all the dull, hard stuff like user management, maintenance, and what I described as “application adulting”.

Well, now building stuff is democratised, we are responsible for sitting down and thinking about our requirements and not just what we need today or what this new shiny toy can do.

The democratisation of tools hasn’t eliminated the need for thinking.

It has eliminated the people who used to force us to do it.

When the designer wanted a brief, that was frustrating.

When the developer wanted requirements, that slowed things down.

When the IT guy wanted to understand scale and compliance, that was tedious.

But that friction was useful.

Now we can build before we’ve thought.

And once you’ve built it, you own it.

With all the adulting.

Choose a platform, build the coolest thing, then decide you need a newsletter, 15 concurrent users, integration to…..

Oh.

Shit.

Democratisation is wonderful.

But with great power comes… well… requirements.

Oh, and as I was publishing this, I did reply to the WhatsApp group, I might be the dull "it depends' guy, but I am not that guy...