The Cleanup Economy
Every tech revolution builds a fast market—and leaves a mess. Cleanup becomes its own economy: FinOps, platform teams, and second-wave consultants turning v1 chaos into stability. The real money? It's in making things actually work.
Every revolution in tech brings two markets:
The first to build it, and the second to fix what got built too fast.
We chase the new thing — fast, hard, messy. We break rules to ship faster. The docs are sparse, the patterns immature, but the incentives all scream go.
And it works — until it doesn’t.
The Innovation Hangover
- Client-server to web left behind bloated middleware and brittle intranet apps.
- Monoliths to microservices gave us a thousand endpoints and no observability.
- Cloud migration cut capex — and created incomprehensible bills.
- AI integration is now stuffing LLMs into workflows without controls or context.
These aren’t failures. They’re side effects of learning in real-time.
The Second Market Moves In
Once the hype cools, a cleanup economy emerges:
- FinOps teams and vendors help you understand your AWS bill.
- Platform engineers bring order to microservice sprawl.
- AI auditors tame hallucination-prone copilots.
- Consultants and internal architects untangle what v1 teams never had time to finish.
These roles aren’t glamorous — but they’re essential.
They don’t disrupt. They stabilize.
Lessons for Builders
The point isn’t to slow down innovation — it’s to recognize the full cycle:
- Every new wave will be followed by the need for refinement.
- The second market isn’t a patch — it’s a product.
- There’s long-term opportunity in making sense of short-term chaos.
If you're burned out chasing the next big thing, take heart:
The next big thing might just be making this one actually work.
