One of the most fascinating multi-year trends I’ve had the opportunity to witness is the systematic ability for people to cut out the middle-man between people with ideas and products and others that want to consume what they are producing. It may have started publicly with the music and publishing industry it’s moving into additional verticals outside of the entertainment industry.
In software it used to be that if you wanted your software to be used by millions of people you had to work for a company like Microsoft, Apple, or Oracle. But app stores and the web have democratized software distribution.
I also believe that this trend is leading to the “democratization” of employment. You don’t need waste time arguing in a room full of executives in order to make a good living. They’ve become the middle-man between the thought-working artists and the customers they were helping.
Now any individual developers can easily reach millions of customers and KickoffLabs wants to cheaply enable people to build the first chunk of those connections directly with their ideal audience.