Selling shovels (spades) vs Mining for gold

A quote describing the gold rushes in the past went something like: "If you want to make money on the goldfields, open a shop selling shovels (spades), don't waste your life looking for gold".

It feels like more startups these days are selling shovels (spades) rather than digging for gold - by that I mean you can't swing a dead cat without hitting bug-trackers, project management apps, CRMs, URL shorteners, wordpress plugins, ebooks etc but who is really digging for gold?

Is this just a sign of a mature market for websites/apps? or lack of creativity/risk-seeking?