Why I'm (re)building Nikapps

I've always been a builder.

The first time I built Nikapps, it was 2011. The App Store was still young, people downloaded apps for fun, and building a decent mobile app was genuinely hard. That difficulty was a moat. If you could ship something that worked, people would try it, love it, and keep it. I spent three years on it, shipped a few things, and then closed it down. Life happened. I moved on.

It's 12 years after that and I'm back. The reason is simple: building has never been faster. AI changed everything. The boilerplate, the tests, the landing page, the stuff that used to eat weeks, now takes an afternoon. A weekend project can look like a real product. The bar for shippable has collapsed.

I'm enjoying my life much more now, and I want to build all the ideas I had and see where they go.

Okay, but what about distribution?

Fair question. You're probably thinking: it's all about distribution now, what's your differentiator as a studio? Anyone can build. So what?

I'll write more about this, but here's the short version. I believe the next mobile apps that grow are the ones that build with communities and grow with communities. In a world where copying (not building from scratch and pushing from 0 to 1) is a commodity, they just fork what works. The apps that win won't be the ones with the best code. They'll be the ones people care about, contribute to, and stick with. Community was always valuable, but now it's the last remaining moat that can differentiate businesses. Community is the moat.

What's live

Placetory is out, it turns a free afternoon into a real, multi-stop outing. Pick a vibe, swipe, and you're out the door. It's live in public beta and getting better every week.

That's enough for now. I'll share more about how we make things different, the small decisions, the things we refuse to ship, and why I'm betting on communities.

Hossein