Vada pav seller gets to make money simply by being near a college and offices. Simply by being in the right shared space near people who need it most or most likely to buy it. No marketing needed.
Whereas for digital products or services you always have to market.
What this means is someone else must have done the work to make the space/street popular or useful and simply by being in proximity to that shop I get to have visitors.
Where in software do you see this? Maybe plugin ecosystems of really popular software but what else
Someone else built the crowd, you just position yourself where the crowd already flows.
In software, this happens whenever you build on top of, inside, or alongside a platform that already aggregates user intent.
One way : designing an api or library
If your library becomes a dependency for popular projects, you get passive distribution through other people's code.
Any app idea that you think you should build, just build a library or api for it instead. APIs and libraries will be picked up by vibecoding tools as well, instant distribution. Claude will do distribution for you :)
Sell APIs and libraries for tools that make genai reliable, safe and predictable