Why smart AI entrepreneurs are now building shovels, not apps

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This post is a guest contribution by George Siosi Samuels, managing director at Faiā. See how Faiā is committed to staying at the forefront of technological advancements here.

Even in a gold rush, the miners rarely get rich. It’s the ones selling the shovels.

As the artificial intelligence (AI) boom barrels into 2024, a new consensus is forming among technical founders and investors: the real leverage isn’t in building another chat app or agent wrapper. It’s in supplying the infrastructure beneath them.

The app layer is oversaturated

From Lovable to Bolt to Replit, we’ve seen a wave of AI app builders rise fast—often boosted by strong branding, early distribution, and influencer-led virality. But beneath the surface, there’s turbulence.

According to a 2024 Gartner report, 70% of AI startups struggle with retention. The reason? Oversaturation. Building on top of foundational models—without clear differentiation—is a race to the bottom. As base models become commoditized, the moat around an “app” thins to a pixel.

Enter the middleware opportunity

Middleware isn’t sexy. It doesn’t go viral on Product Hunt. But it solves the real problems that actual builders face.

That’s where @CodeGuideDev, by Cj Z, steps in—a middleware tool tackling hallucinations and context limitations in LLM-based dev environments. It’s not trying to replace OpenAI or build the next ChatGPT. It’s stitching the seams where the fabric still rips.

According to a 2023 McKinsey study, middleware-focused tech firms achieved 30% higher margins than their front-end counterparts. Why? Less competition, deeper integrations, and higher switching costs.

The smart money is flowing quietly into tools that augment, not replace.

Lessons from Web3: Build the rails, not just the riders

This pattern should feel familiar if you’ve been in the blockchain world long enough. The winners weren’t always the token projects—they were the exchanges, the custody solutions, the compliance tools. 

Infrastructure, not hype.

AI is going through its own ICO era. Amid the noise, middleware is the equivalent of Layer 1 protocols and smart contract tooling—technically invisible but economically indispensable.

Riding the ecosystem instead of rebuilding it

Take @cline, a VS Code extension praised by Cj Z. It competes with Cursor and Windsurf (one of my favorite AI IDEs at the moment), not by brute-forcing distribution, but by embedding itself into an existing workflow.

Blueprint for building a $1M AI middleware business

Cj laid it out plainly on X here:

• Target a specific industry gap
• Build middleware that solves a persistent pain
• Leverage existing ecosystems (vs. rebuilding them)
• Market like a wartime founder—focused, consistent, strategic

And the numbers back it up. As Forbes reported in 2024, 60% of successful SaaS startups this year focused on narrow, niche tools.

What blockchain founders can learn from this

If you’re already deep in enterprise blockchain—where real value is found in protocol-level design, interoperability, and trust layers—you’re primed for the middleware game in AI.

Don’t try to outpace OpenAI. Instead:

• Translate on-chain logic to AI-native environments.
• Build validators for AI output.
• Create compliance bridges between smart contracts and LLMs.
• Design AI co-pilots that understand multi-sig wallets, not just to-do lists.

The next billion-dollar idea won’t be an agent that fetches coffee. It’ll be the invisible protocol that powers 100 agents without anyone noticing.

Final signal

The gold rush is here. But the smartest founders aren’t chasing gold—they’re crafting the tools, protocols, and layers that let others dig faster, smarter, and safer.

In AI, just like in blockchain, shovels scale. Apps get buried.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

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