Building is the easy part
AI made shipping a product an afternoon's work. The thing nobody can automate for you is getting someone to care.
A few years ago, building software was the moat. If you could ship it, you had something most people couldn't copy. That's over.
I can describe a product to a model in the morning and have it running by lunch. So can you. So can the person you're worried about competing with. When building collapses to nothing, the value moves to the thing that didn't get cheaper: distribution.
The bottleneck moved
Every founder I talk to is still optimising the wrong half. They polish the product, add the feature, redesign the landing page — and then wonder why nobody shows up. The product was never the constraint. Getting a stranger to give you thirty seconds of attention is the constraint, and it has been for a long time.
There are only three ways to get that attention:
- Owned — you build an audience and tell them yourself. Slow to start, compounding forever.
- Borrowed — you go where someone else's audience already is. Fast, but you're renting.
- Bought — you pay for it. Instant, and it stops the second you stop paying.
Most people pick one by accident. The ones who win pick deliberately, and usually run all three.
What this means for what you build
If distribution is the hard part, then the smartest thing you can build is something a lot of people genuinely need — and then own how it reaches them. That's how you climb: not by taking from anyone, but by being useful at scale. I'll write about that next.
Build less. Serve more people. The product was always going to be the easy part.