You are building a communication tool
Humans suck at communication. Don’t get me wrong, we are social animals that do it everyday. Some are better than others, but across the board, we frankly suck. That’s why we build communication tools. I’m not just talking about tools like Slack, Discord, and Zoom. I’m talking GitHub, Terraform, photo apps, and the list is literally endless. Every alerting system, every sharing system, every marketplace, every banking system, is a communication tool. A company is communicating your financial health and balance to you. You are sharing pictures and text with friends and family to communicate with them. You get an alert/notification that a system has an error. You login to a website and are communicating your credentials to the server that you are who you say you are. It all may seem like a stretch, but once you really sit down to think about it, the world makes a lot more sense.
It permeates every industry. The most successful B2C (business to consumer) apps are about communication. Dating apps, social media apps, chat apps, podcast/music apps, etc. You could maybe classify some of it as “distribution”, but distribution of information or content is basically communication. When we speak or write, we distribute our thoughts to another person. So how does this apply to building software? Honestly, I feel like it’s obvious at this point, but let’s dive in.