Here is how I see things going for solo operators or small businesses, soon.

Say you are a solo operator. Massages. You make house visits. Your business has some self-promotion, scheduling, and mostly you spend time going around doing massages, pay at time of service. Nothing fancy. Basically what you need is scheduling, which you can do via email.

This is easy.

You can describe your business in a markdown file. You write it up, talk about scheduling rules, travel time, etc. Paste it into Google AI Studio. Google AI studio generates code for your website. You paste it somewhere, done.

But also, you post your markdown to Github.

Someone else comes along. Same thing, but they want customers to be able to self-schedule and pay at time of scheduling. So they take your markdown, clone it, add to it. They add calendar integration. They add Stripe integration. Google AI Studio generates the code, they figure out where to host it, done.

They also publish their markdown to Github.

Someone else comes along. They want more features. Multiple staff. Cancellation and refund policies. You know. This is no problem; they start with the existing markdown, describe what they want, Google AI Studio, host. Done.

The markdown gets more features. It gets shared. It gets parameterized. It gets copied and forked.

Ok, you say, Um Mark, this doesn’t work, it needs to be hosted, security review, database, etc.

Sure. That’s where GoDaddy steps in. Or someone else. Basically, someone who today is already doing hosting for small business and startups. A month from now you’ll see “GoDaddy AI Studio”. It’s just like Google AI Studio, but it does hosting. You paste your markdown in, click Build, they build it and host it. And they provide extra features, like monthly security review - their AI bot will review your markdown and code every month, update it, rebuild it for you.

The markdown can be shared, forked, modified, “pull request”ed, and enhanced by anyone. By everyone.

End result:

Every small business gets their own personal software. Their business rules. All perfectly customized for them. If they can describe it in markdown, they can have it.

Markdown is the new open source. Coming soon to a small business near you.