"Anything That Works" Is Exactly How You End Up Like Yahoo

I was on a call with a developer on my team recently. We were reviewing a build - chatbot updates, file upload logic, a handful of UI fixes. Standard progress call. Midway through, he dropped a line I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

"The best thing is, anything that works is a good platform."

He was talking about Bubble - the no-code tool we've been using to build out early versions of our product. And he wasn't wrong. For what we needed - fast MVPs, quick iterations, getting something in front of users without burning months on infrastructure - Bubble works.

But in the same conversation, less than five minutes later, he said this:

Bubble is becoming the Yahoo of no-code.

First mover advantage. Functional. Getting left behind by every platform that came after it, because it stopped innovating at the speed the category demands. He used those exact words. "It's like Yahoo versus Google. It was one of the first movers, but now it's leaving behind things like Xano and other platforms. It's a matter of time."

Both statements are simultaneously true. And the fact that the same person said them both - in the same call, minutes apart - is exactly the trap I want to break down.

The Philosophy Is Right. The Problem Is the Expiration Date.

Pragmatism is the correct default for builders. You don't have time to evaluate every tool on the market before you ship. You pick what's working for people you trust, you build, you iterate. Anything that works is better than nothing that exists.

Pieter Levels - the guy behind Nomad List, Remote OK, and a stack of other profitable solo projects - famously builds everything in the most unglamorous, bare-bones PHP you've ever seen. The guy is extracting millions from a tech stack that would make a senior Google engineer visibly wince. But it works. It ships.

My developer mentioned Mark Liu on this call. "He's like the new Levels," he said - and he's right. Mark's been building straight-up Next.js with no platforms or no-code middlemen involved. I sent the video of Mark's full tech stack to my developer over Slack. His reaction: yeah, this is where serious builders are going.

"Works" is how you ship product. "Works" becomes the answer to every future question - including whether you should still be using this thing at all.

Yahoo Worked.

Here's the fact people erase when they tell the Yahoo story: Yahoo was not a failure from the start. It was a pioneer. For years, it was the internet for a massive chunk of the population. It worked - completely, profitably, undeniably.

And then Google showed up. And Yahoo's internal response, repeated over and over, was some version of: we're fine. We work. People use us. This is fine.

The pragmatist looks at that story and thinks: they should have adapted faster. But adaptation requires admitting that "works right now" is a different claim than "works in three years." Yahoo couldn't make that admission. The very quality that made them confident - users, traffic, revenue, proof it works - became the exact reason they couldn't see what was happening around them.

My developer called it exactly right about Bubble. Bubble was a first mover. It let a whole generation of developers and non-developers build products without writing a line of code. That opened software development to people who couldn't code. And now other platforms are moving faster, doing more, while Bubble iterates at the pace of a company that got comfortable.

He's been, as he put it, "significantly invested" in Bubble - deep in the tool, skilled in it, building with it. And he can see from the inside that he probably won't be using it professionally in a couple of years.

His exact words: "I cannot see it innovating at the speed the platforms are innovating."

That's the tell. The category is accelerating and Bubble's rate of improvement isn't keeping pace.

The Contradiction

Those two statements - "anything that works is a good platform" and "Bubble is the next Yahoo" - came from the same person in the same call, minutes apart, without connecting them.

The second statement is just the first statement run forward in time. If "anything that works" is your criterion, and the platform stops working at the level the market demands, you need to update the answer. The philosophy requires the audit. The philosophy gets treated as a permanent verdict instead of a provisional one.

This isn't a knock on my developer. He clearly sees it. He's the one who made the Yahoo comparison. Separating a principle from its implications for your own decisions is human nature.

I do it too. We're still building on Bubble right now because it ships fast and it works for early-stage product development. But I said it out loud on the call: "I think the long-term thing is just using Bubble for MVPs, because once we're operating at full scale, we're gonna have to rebuild basically everything we've already built here in Bubble."

That's how you use "anything that works" correctly: you timestamp it. You say it works until this condition. Define the trigger in advance. For us, the trigger is scale - the moment the product needs to do things that no-code can't handle at the speed we require.

If you can't name your trigger, you're already on Yahoo time.

The Enterprise Version of This Problem

This dynamic shows up everywhere. Not just in tech stacks. In clients, in channels, in relationships.

My developer told me a story from his own freelancing work. He'd been brought in on an enterprise project - big company, long sales cycle, the full organizational hierarchy. First call, a manager showed up. Then meetings passed with only the manager's assistant present. "This looks good, this looks good, fine, perfect, I will talk to the manager." Two months go by. More assistants. More check-ins. Then the original manager reappears on what turned out to be the last call and says: "This is not what I was expecting. I'm calling this project off." They paid for the entire project. But it was dead.

I had the same thing happen at my agency. We got brought in by a company, built a solid working relationship with the marketing director who championed us internally - and then the next day, she was fired. We kept showing up to the meetings anyway. For a full year. They kept paying. The people left in the room had no idea who we were or what we were doing there, but the budget line existed and no one ever canceled it.

Both situations are "anything that works" at the organizational level. The client relationship worked - right up until the single person holding it together was gone. Neither of us had built enough redundancy into the engagement to survive that one variable changing.

The client keeps paying, work continues, and from the outside everything looks fine. Until it isn't. A good run rate can hide a single point of failure until it breaks.

Speed Is the Signal

My developer's observation about Bubble is about rate of change.

When you're evaluating any platform, any channel, any tool - ask whether it's improving faster than the alternatives. If yes, you're probably fine. If no, you're on Yahoo time and the clock is running.

Cold email gets this question thrown at it constantly. "Is cold email still working?" The honest answer is yes, and what "works" inside it keeps changing. Deliverability rules keep changing. Inbox providers update their filters. What was getting 40% open rates a while back gets blocked now. The channel works - but what "works" means inside it requires constant updating.

Instantly is a perfect example - their founders joined Galadon Gold in the early days, and I watched them go from zero to their first $10K MRR and scale from there. They came in, saw what was working, and built something that fit the current moment. The tools that were "working" before them didn't disappear overnight - they just gradually stopped being the best answer.

Even Intercom just did a whole rebuild and went all-in on AI. I've been watching that space closely - they're not doing sales enablement the way we are with Galadon, but they're moving fast, and you should track companies moving fast in your direction. The future in this category is clearly AI-first. Anyone building AI-adjacent tools right now who isn't running fast is already falling behind, even if their current product still technically works.

The operators who stay ahead of this are honest about the provisional nature of every answer they've ever given.

What This Looks Like in Practice

So what do you do with this?

First: stop treating platform decisions as permanent. Every choice should have a trigger - a condition under which you'd revisit it. If you can't articulate that condition, you've already made the Yahoo move. "We use X" is fine. "We use X until [condition]" is how serious operators think. The trigger doesn't have to be complicated. "We use this until it can't handle our volume" or "we use this until two of the best builders we know have publicly moved on" - those are legitimate triggers. Write them down.

Second: watch what the fastest builders are using. Pay attention to what they reach for when they have to ship fast. Right now, people like Mark Liu are doing straight Next.js, no platforms. That's a signal. Pieter Levels is still on PHP and it still works for him - which is also a signal, just a different one. Watch for when builders who used to push a platform hard just stop mentioning it.

Third: tools that got big because they were the only option need extra scrutiny. Bubble got big in a world where building custom software was the only alternative to no-code. That world is gone. The moat for "only option" is different from the moat for "best." A lot of tools are operating on moats that no longer exist. They have users, they have revenue, and from the outside they look fine - but they're on Yahoo time.

The Bigger Pattern

I've been in the room for a lot of technology transitions. The web went from static to dynamic. Mobile ate software. Cloud ate infrastructure, and AI changed the economics of entire software categories basically overnight - I built and sold Taplio, one of the first SaaS apps built on top of OpenAI, before ChatGPT was even publicly launched.

Every single time, there were smart people in those rooms saying "this works." And they were right. It did work. Right up until it stopped being competitive, at which point "it works" became the exact thing blocking them from seeing what was happening.

My developer isn't going to make that mistake. He already sees it. He made the Yahoo comparison himself - which means he understands the pattern and he's not going to be the person defending a no-code platform that the market moved past. He's planning around it. We're planning around it together. WeWork office in Nashville, building toward a team there - and when the product scales, we'll need infrastructure Bubble can't support.

The question for you is: where in your own business are you saying "this works" about something that's already on Yahoo time? What's the platform, the tool, the channel, the client relationship - that's currently functional, but where the alternatives are improving faster than you are?

Find it, give it a timestamp, and name the trigger so you have a plan for when it fires.

Anything that works is a good platform. For now. That's the only version of that sentence that doesn't eventually cost you everything.

If you're in the middle of figuring out what to build, scale, or replace in your own outbound system, the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint is a good place to start - it covers the core decisions at each stage of agency growth, not just the early ones. And if you want to think through the stack - tools, sequences, targeting - I break all of that down inside Galadon Gold. Live calls, decisions in the moment, operators who are building right now.