Apps Need Their Own YouTube – Not Just an App Store

01 /The Concept

Wabi believes we are entering a new era of personal software. The site is currently waitlist-only, but the company has announced it raised $20 million in its first round.

The round was led by a16z, with participation from a notable group of angels – the founder of Replit, the CEO of Y Combinator, Naval Ravikant, and others.

Wabi's framing starts with Apple's famous line when it launched the App Store: "If you need an app, we have one for you." And for a long time, that held up.

But years passed. Phone screens look essentially the same as they did a decade ago – a grid of icons from a small number of mega-platforms, each built for billions of people at once. One size for everyone.

Wabi's answer: the first platform for personal software – mini-apps of any size and purpose, built for specific people rather than mass audiences. Apps for someone, not just for something.

On the platform, apps can be created solo or collaboratively, from scratch or adapted from apps others have shared, and distributed to friends or followers.

Wabi's bet is that people will eventually look back at the App Store the way they look back at broadcast television – a handful of channels serving only mass-market content.

As Wabi's founder puts it: for the past 50 years, software was built by specialists for ordinary people. The next 50 years will belong to ordinary people building software for themselves and each other.

Television followed the same trajectory: trained professionals produced content for passive audiences. Then YouTube arrived, and ordinary people started creating and publishing video – and watching it – and creating more. Wabi is betting that software is approaching its own "YouTube moment."

02 /Why It Matters

Back in August, a partner at a16z published a piece with the provocative title "Disposable Software."

For most of computing history, writing software was expensive and difficult, so programs were built to last – every line of code had to justify its cost. Durability and scale were prerequisites for the investment.

But AI has changed the economics dramatically. Building a small app is now fast, cheap, and accessible. Which means the old requirement – that software earn its keep – is fading. The only constraint on building software is now imagination.

The author of that piece built a math game for his kids where they solved problems to earn screen time. He built a "family Instagram" just for cat photos. These weren't products. They weren't startups. They had no monetization plan and no scale ambitions. They were apps built for specific people in specific, narrow contexts.

"Disposable" is the label he chose – though the apps might get used repeatedly. The spirit is disposable: easy to build, easy to set aside when the need passes or the novelty fades. Something impossible to justify before AI made it essentially costless.

That same partner championed the a16z investment in Wabi. The fund's reasoning draws the YouTube parallel explicitly. In 2006, YouTube was full of amateur dancers, musicians, and home videos. But embedded in that scrappiness was a new, internet-native business model for entertainment – one that would eventually power YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Hobbyists became professionals. New formats emerged. New creators built lasting brands. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok became the proving ground for a "long tail" of creative success stories that broadcast television could never have accommodated.

a16z believes the same inflection point is arriving for software. As YouTube democratized video creation, Wabi is democratizing software creation.

What separates Wabi from pure AI code-generation platforms is the social layer. Wabi is building a network of people creating apps, using apps, and doing both – a single platform where creation and distribution form a continuous loop. Most AI products currently lack this network effect, being designed for one-on-one interaction between user and AI. Wabi proposes a different model.

03 /Opportunities

When Shopify launched, investors passed because the market of 40,000 online stores seemed too small. Shopify's actual contribution was to democratize e-commerce – making it accessible to anyone. Today, 1.5 million stores run on Shopify alone, and there are tens of millions more across the internet.

Facebook democratized personal branding. YouTube and TikTok democratized television. Airbnb democratized hospitality. Uber democratized taxi service. In each case, the breakthrough wasn't making something more efficient – it was expanding who could participate by orders of magnitude.

AI is the new engine for this kind of market expansion, and it's just getting started.

Legal services: AI-powered legal tools can deliver advice at dramatically lower cost, opening access to legal remedies that were previously economically irrational to pursue. Suing a landlord, an airline, or an employer over a dispute where the damages are modest but the hassle is significant – that's a category where paying a traditional lawyer made no sense, but AI legal tools change the equation. See related reviews [here](/review/rynok-est-no-na-njom-nikto-ne-rabotaet-neuzheli-takoe-byvaet) and [here](/review/idti-nuzhno-tuda-chto-mozhet-rasshiritsja).

Video creation: AI platforms are making it possible to produce clips, animation, narrative film, and serialized content without the traditional costs of writers, actors, editors, and equipment. What previously required a studio can now be accomplished by an individual with creative vision. More examples [here](/review/a-vot-jetim-malo-kto-zanimaetsja-nu-i-ochen-zrja) and [here](/review/jeto-budet-dazhe-kruche-chem-it-startapy).

Software: which is exactly what Wabi represents – a world where anyone can build an app not just as a business move, but for entertainment, creative expression, community building, or any other reason that doesn't need to clear an economic bar.

The biggest takeaway from Wabi's story isn't about software specifically. It's a mental model for startup ideation: stop thinking about how to make something marginally better or more efficient. Ask instead whether your startup could dramatically expand the population of people who can do something that was previously too expensive or too difficult.

AI is the tool that makes many such expansions newly possible. The potential is far from fully explored. What could people start doing with AI – at scale, for the first time – that they previously couldn't afford or weren't capable of doing?