The App Was Never the Hard Part

We keep getting introduced to software companies built around one app.

One workflow. Usually well designed, usually built by people who know that workflow cold.

They all want the same thing. They want to be included on our platform.

For years, I took these meetings the same way.

Then something dawned on me this week.

The math underneath those meetings has changed.

Fifteen minutes

Here is what happened to the cost of building an app.

AI can build that app in about fifteen minutes.

Okay — a few hours, if we really need to integrate it.

That sentence would have sounded ridiculous two years ago.

Shoot — it would have sounded ridiculous two months ago. These latest models are wild. The world has leapt forward, and most of this industry is still scheduling partnership meetings like it hasn't.

That is not a knock on the app. Some of them are very good, and the people who built them understand their corner of the hospital better than I do. It is a statement about what an app is worth on its own now, which is a different thing.

When a customer describes a workflow they need, we don't go find someone to bolt on. We build it. Usually before the follow-up call.

So think about what a one-app company is actually selling. They are selling the years it took to build the app. Those years used to be the moat.

The moat is now fifteen minutes wide.

What is still hard

Here is what AI did not make easy.

Getting connected to Epic, nurse call, smart beds, and the rest of the hospital's systems — and keeping those connections alive through every upgrade on both sides.

Managing the devices on the walls of real patient rooms, for years.

Earning the trust of hospital IT, one security review at a time.

And people. Real people, who know the product because they built it and deployed it.

That is what a platform is. The app on the screen is the last ten percent. Everything underneath it is the twenty years.

You get to talk to us

There is one more thing we built that most software companies don't have, no matter their size.

You get to talk to us. On the phone. Every day, if you want.

Not a ticket queue. Not a chatbot performing empathy. Not a support rep who started three years after the product was built and is reading the same knowledge base article you already found.

You call, and you talk to people who built the thing, who know your hospital, and who can fix it — or build you the feature — while you are still on the phone.

In an industry where the apps became free to build, that might be the only thing left that can't be generated.

What this means if you're buying

If a vendor's entire company is one app, ask what happens when your platform vendor — or an afternoon with an AI tool — can produce the same thing.

You are not buying the app. You are buying everything around it. The integrations, the deployments, the support, the people who answer the phone at 2 AM. Ask how much of that exists.

Earlier this week I wrote that every customer needs to see a custom demo now, because custom became fast.

Same force, next domino: every customer can have custom features now.

The room, the integrations, the people — that is what you actually choose.

Ask us for the feature you need