The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
I wonder if this type of hustling can be called moat building?
Marketing, lawyers, good customer support, creating relationships with customers.
Having money is NOT an economic moat-- i.e., a durable, structural competitive advantage.
He overlooks broader, true definition of moat attributes like labor supply, infrastructure, PP&E, brand, network, natural monopolies, switching costs, regulation. These don't go away with commoditized CRUD apps.
And quoting someone with decades of experience implying that things are hard now and innovation didn't turn over industries in the last 25+ years is a joke.
I always ask people, in the past year, how many AI-coded apps have you 1) downloaded 2) paid for?
I mean, there is evidence for some change. Personally, I'm sceptical of what this will amount to, but prior to EOY 2025, there really wasn't any evidence for an app/service boom, and now there's weak evidence, which is better than none.
1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise.
2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase.
3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.
I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
In the past 5 years, the only "new" app I've added to my phone has been Claude.ai.
Before that I guess DoorDash. And that probably covers the past 7ish years of phone use.
There's just too much shit in the store, a lot of it is scammy or has dark patterns.
This isn't true though.
Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems.
However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.
You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version, which is pretty incredible to be in the middle of.
Every solution to a problem comes with its own costs. It is entirely possible that most solutions that are rooted in modern computing technology have actual or perceived costs that exceed the value of "solving the problem".
The problems that most people have that they really want to solve are not addressable by AI, or computers, or software.
If you have a product that:
1. Solves a real problem people would pay for
2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors
3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers
Then you need the marketing budget.
That is not most people's problem.
It will take a few years for investors to figure this out, but in the meantime, everyone is spreading their bets around like peanut butter in order to be in the game.
Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.
I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of brainfog from being sick today.
Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or something?
Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount the value of other businesses.
Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20% because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed something.
This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are hard.
An idea is not a moat. Execution is only a moat if being nimble is part of the ongoing offering.
Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine can instantly compete with you?
It's trivial for competitors with bigger pockets to outcompete you on your idea, and there are companies whose business model is just that. And with AI customers are trying to do it themselves as well. The only startup I wouldn't be nervous about as a small team without large financial backing would be ones where we start out partnered to multiple companies in the targeted industry so that we can leverage that connection.
Historically this is why we have copyright/patent laws. To make it make sense for people to try to bring their ideas to the world. But with everything changing we are back to everyone just sitting on their concepts/solutions unless they have big money behind them.
Maybe the guy doing their 9-5 can run many agents to make them money while they work their day job.
Is that a thing, you get hired at some company then you use an agent to work for you, deep fake video calls, cursor code... that would be crazy. Get another job and split your time between agents for minor corrections.
Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.
Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.
no one is willing to pay you for easy.
So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.
Not that I know much of anything.
Just because you're doing something hard, doesn't mean anyone wants it.
Just because you're doing something useful doesn't mean you're going to get paid much for it.
Just because something is hard and useful doesn't mean someone is going to pay you for the cost of the effort.
Conversely, a good strategy can get you good results without that much effort.
Not saying that’s what will happen in reality, but that is the marketing pitch
Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big.
But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to visit.
Money (better thought of as credit, since we are talking about fiat here) is an attractor so much as it can stand for or purchase productive energy. If that fails (central bank failure, currency failure, government failure), creativity takes its place
But it's also not a moat in the same way. It's accessible to everyone, but you have to actually disregard the parts of yourself that want to drive hard in some direction just for money or power or external validation.
From the look of things right now, it may take some pain before that really gets to shine.
Don't underestimate the effectiveness of advertising, or its ability to influence you.
I particularly despise these ads in Maps because the ad often obscures the search result I'm looking for -- and I end up accidentally clicking on an advertisement for some other restaurant than the one I was looking up.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, you may be thinking of restaurants where their defining factor is "having a very creative atmosphere", which will not suit all customers. However it is a differentiating factor which will serve a big audience that is under served in a location filled with "boring well maintained and staffed restaurant".
In my view the creativity comes in in finding solutions to a problem, in a oversaturated market the problem may be "how do I persuade customers to come to my restaurant instead of my competitor?". And following that question may be (in the restaurant example) "what can I offer that is under served in the current market?" The solution to that may be "a biker cafe" or "an overpriced "creative" restaurant where the waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse" (perhaps even rude on purpose).
Additionally I assume you want the restaurant to grow. If you want the restaurant to just survive the bar is lower and you may be able to do that by doing the same everyone else is doing as long as you meet the minimum.
One day we might be able to write software without bugs. That day is clearly not here yet.
(Firefox in Linux if anyone wants to repro. Can’t file a bug as it’s a closed, proprietary piece of software.)
I am a firm believer of "limitation breeds creativity" and being able to make what you want with immediate result will lead to less diverse solutions. In a world of in-diverse products you need more creativity to stand out as it will become harder to conceive of something "outside of the box".
Similarly to how anyone can basically create any image they desire in Photoshop (with some limited training). Leading to a lot of images of a similar style instead of a lot of different styles (ai slop anyone?). This is because between the idea and the result the roadblocks are reduced, the process is smooth (tools aim for 1:1 conversion). In the creative process these roadblocks are usually where you will find interesting new directions or ideas. And very often the original idea was not that interesting to begin with (and perhaps not as original as we would like to believe).
However, I've gotten doubts about the value of creativity and having a vision. Plenty of people have great creativity and a fantastic vision, and we can see already how AI allows people to churn out interesting and useful projects at much faster pace than just a few years ago. The problem is that it seems more and more impossible to actually make a living of that.
Anybody with the money to have access to enough AI will be able to create a clone of software X. We might not be there quite yet but it's just a matter of time. That seems to be a death sentence for any small software business.
>This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.
That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph
Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
I'm a novelist and software engineer. The value of one of those skills is trending to zero. I'm not seeing much to suggest, in the face of the hockey stick of doom, that the other isn't.
I don't know what you wrote and I agree that it is very sad that the skill of writing is very undervalued at this moment. But I think that trend is not new and in reality not created by AI (just accelerated). But I think value of writing was never in the writing itself but the knowledge and ideas behind the writing. Because mechanics of writing sped up (handwritten, typewriter, word processor). But the process of writing a novel did not speed up significantly as the bottleneck is the ideas and iteration on those ideas not the delivery of the output. Similar to how programming is more then typing code.
So I think the real crisis right now is that people equate typing speed with programming speed (or writing speed) and due to advances in the former undervalue the later.
Sadly the reality is that it won't pay for the bills anymore.
Perhaps in a while people will realize how important the quality of ideas (and the iteration to arrive at them) is.
You know that if anything you build gets traction, it'll be cloned by 100 people, right?
No! I fundamentally reject this.
The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.
The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been.
Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste.
Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated.
So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries.
And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste.
(And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)
Imagine American manufacturing industry workers saying the same thing of the (at the time) soon-to-be import only products. Original thoughts are valued more than non-original ones but maybe, the market doesn't require that many original thoughts to extract max profit...
Or an absurd amount of skill.
Say Amy is a great NodeJS and front end programer.
She can work on her own projects , but her kids can't eat hope and dreams.
Or she can get a job at SoulCrusher Solutions trying to maximum advertising revenue.
But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss
AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper?
I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?
Abundance of copy cats that cannot make any money as prices are raced to zero.
It feels like that doesn't it? But, as one counter-point, OpenClaw. :)
Btw I did a deep-dive into AI moats last week and wrote a blog post about it. Relationships were most likely the strongest moat from my research - but definitely having a large amount of money in reserves helps. https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-a...
The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.
And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.
Kind of nice to know I don’t have to blame myself anymore.
And then there's classic confirmation bias; a lot of people wrote in dry academic prose.
the gravitational threshold thing is real ngl. I've seen the same dynamic in product launches - identical quality, completely different outcomes based on whether you're already above the line or not. that part holds up
not sure the "creativity is the moat" counterargument fully lands either. yeah taste matters, but AstroBen's point is valid - anything that gets traction gets cloned basically immediately now. so creativity gets you first mover advantage for like... a week?
maybe the actual moat is just community? people who already trust you before you ship. which is a form of reach I guess, so kind of proves the point
Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries.
If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that.
Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable.
Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of that community?
All those are perceived moats (or risks) by these folks that tried to scoop him up.
I don't find a single counter-example compelling. I guess as evidence that "only moat" is somewhat hyperbolic?
But to counter the counter-example, what would have happened if he did not join? OpenAI can just write and release their own version. They can then do the typical loss-leader and advertising tricks that OpenClaw cannot.
The "simply write and release" is what used to be a barrier.
In the case of OpenClaw I think you're looking at a fairly pure iteration of luck there, too. It isn't even a case of "I prepared for years until luck finally knocked" or any variant like that. It was just luck.
If that is the only counterexample I'd say it doesn't disprove the point, if anything it just strengthens it. Nobody can build a business plan based on "I plan to be as lucky as OpenClaw".
Current examples: esoteric calculations that are not public knowledge; historical data that you collected and someone else didn't; valuable proprietary data; having good taste; having insider knowledge of a niche industry; making physical things; attracting an audience.
Some things that were recently difficult are now easy, but general perception has not caught up. That means there's arbitrage—you can charge the old prices for creating a web app, but execute it in a day. But this arbitrage will not last forever; we will see downward price pressure on anything that is newly easy. So my advice is: take advantage now.
Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.
This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.
I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was.
The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P
Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing sure does help, but software is a bubble.
This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will actually be watched.
Yes, you need the idea first of course. But that's truly the easy part. 99% of "ideas" rely on great execution to be worth even looking at - much less paying for - for anyone else.
LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.
Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed..
This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.
I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.
There are people who are sick of social media and will never be convinced to join up again. They've already left the building and aren't looking for anything else. I'm not quite there, but almost.
Other people are using established social media simply because that's where their people and orgs publish. I am eternally frustrated when my local cafe uses Insta or FB for their "web presence", but I'm not going to be the one to convince them to use something else. I hate that my local rock climbing partner finder group is located on FB, but what can I do about it? I also think it sucks that there are thousands of people in that group - I soon realized that this group simply doesn't work for me, since rock climbing requires high trust and I can't trust thousands of people.
Many people resist the idea of signing up for yet another social media account, esp when none of their people/orgs are already there. For example, I've sometimes thought of starting a Heylo group for local rock climbers to find partners - this might actually help me find more climbing partners. But I've never tried it. I just don't think people will join. The barrier to entry is (1) install app (2) create login (3) use app. SFAICT no one wants to do this if they're already on FB and already are a member of the group there. Even people that I know manage finding partners with email lists (gag). Can you imagine how much higher the barrier to entry would be if adding (4) you have to pay a monthly fee?
I do like the idea of "only allowed to invite someone that you know in meatspace" but how is this enforced? I also recognize that requiring payment could help increase the trust level, and I recognize that members have to pay in some way (ads, fees, sponsors, privacy violations) in order to support the platform.
I'm old (52) and a bit AI hysterical despite being well aware of the reasons I supposedly shouldn't be (variations of Jevon's Paradox, the fact that we've had similar disruptions before, etc).
I can't help but think that both the speed and massive breadth of the AI disruption across so many industries all at once makes this a very different risk than anything we've experienced before, in my lifetime or before it.
It also doesn't help that at least here in the US this is all occurring when our government is both openly corrupt and particularly dysfunctional at solving any of the real-world problems facing its own citizens.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-investors-access-space...
It would be hilarious if the final "IPOs" will be in SPAC form with the help of SPAC king Chamath.
> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.
They launched a paid social network, with no content available without joining a waitlist.
This would not have worked 20 years ago either. Bootstrapping the content for a _free_ social network is incredibly hard. But a paid social network where the only differentiating factor is that users are humans, and there is no activity in the network? Not going to work.
I understand it was already the trend 25 years ago, but way before that you really weren't expected to be able to make money building things for the internet.
The internet itself was simply not designed for that to begin with.
Building things where the internet was an element was already getting bad enough.
The force from within to return to "normal" baseline may yield, but probably never go away.
>The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.
As said every millennium since institutions and finance have existed.
>Show HN, the one place the internet was supposed to notice if you built something real.
No no no no no. This is for people who want to share with a much more limited audience than the entire internet.
HN readers did notice a lot of times especially when the project is amazing, OTOH sometimes the latest little side project from somebody well-known, or random interest could be shown.
Naturally the most popular things are free since that's inherently the most compatible with the internet anyway.
But real marketing and promotion is supposed to be far away from this site. If you're trying to sell to "the internet" you've got the whole rest of the internet for that.
HN is not supposed to be enough to be widely noticed at all, if you've got something that's worth marketing, YC is there the whole time and might be able to get you making the most of the internet and then some. Especially if you need a moat of money.
But why do so many people think the only business plan is to prepare to be sieged by a small enough horde which can be deterred by a moat anyway?
>if you're not already moving, you might never take off.
>The cost of acting like it isn't true when it is: permanent.
As I first mentioned, the internet being in place so people can make money off of it is the thing that just wasn't true to begin with, lots of people had some pretty good workarounds for a while though.
I've been watching businesses from startups to large corporations lock in high costs the exact same way for decades before the internet ever came around.
Software to most of this discussion is a web app with a landing page, a pricing tier, and MRR. That's it. The frame is "product," the metric is "traction," and the canvas is "things people pay $9/month for."
But software is instructions that make matter and energy do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's the most general-purpose tool humans have ever built. So let's actually think about what's underbuilt:
The whole damn physical world is barely instrumented. Agricultural systems, water infrastructure, building envelopes, soil health, local microclimates. There are farmers making irrigation decisions on vibes. Municipal water systems with no real-time leak detection. Buildings hemorrhaging energy because nobody's modeled their thermal behavior. These aren't apps. They're control systems, and they're mostly missing.
Fabrication and manufacturing are being transformed by CNC/3D printing but the software for designing things to be manufactured is still terrible (and inaccessible!). Generative design that accounts for material properties, toolpath constraints, assembly sequences. CAM software is where word processors were in 1985.
Scientific instruments. A spectrometer is mostly software now. So is a radio telescope. So is a seismograph. Every goddamn thing can be a thermometer (accidentaly!) The gap between "data sensor exists" and "useful scientific instrument" is almost entirely software, and most of that software is written by grad students in unmaintained Python.
Preservation. Some people are doing this with datamuseum.dk. But expand it: there are entire musical traditions, oral histories, craft techniques, ecological knowledge systems that exist in living memory and nowhere else. Software for capturing, encoding, and transmitting that knowledge barely exists. Not "an app for recording grandma," but formal knowledge representation of, say, how a master boatbuilder in Kerala selects wood by sound and flex.
Prosthetics and rehabilitation. This one is big for me personally! The gap between what a modern prosthetic limb could do with good software and what it actually does is enormous. Why are my eyeballs still chunks of plastic? Same for cognitive rehabilitation tools, speech therapy systems, physical therapy feedback loops.
Governance and collective decision-making. Every organization above 20 people is making decisions with tools that are basically "email plus meetings plus a shared doc." Formal deliberation systems, preference aggregation, transparent resource allocation. These are hard computer science problems that nobody's building because they don't have obvious MRR.
Tools for thought that aren't note-taking apps with backlinks. Actual reasoning aids. Argument mapping. Assumption tracking. Decision support that makes your thinking better rather than your typing faster.
The entire domain of formal verification applied to things that matter. Bridges, medical devices, voting systems, financial settlement. We have figured out how to prove some? software correct. We almost never do it for the software where correctness actually matters.
And that's me, one person, in five minutes. Every domain expert in the world is sitting on a pile of unsolved problems that software could address, and most of them have never talked to a programmer because programmers are busy building the next task management app.
Go talk to a nurse, a farmer, a building inspector, a food bank logistics coordinator. Ask them what's broken. I promise the answer isn't "nothing" and I promise nobody on ProductHunt is solving it.
PG wrote essays about this ffs! "Make something people want." "Live in the future and build what's missing." That advice didn't stop being true because AI made the building part cheaper. If anything it's more true now, because the building is almost free, which means the noticing is almost the entire game. You are skipping the noticing and going straight to the building, then wondering why nobody cares.
The number of hard things isn't going down. This thread can't see them because it's not looking at the world. It's looking at ProductHunt.
To make things concrete, in the last week I have been working on my open source speech synthesizer, rebuilding Klatt's ideas from the 1980 paper up to modern emotion/prosody work. Did you know the whole field went nuts for neural approaches in ~2018 and there's a whole shitload of interesting papers just sitting out there that nobody has ever implemented in a real system? Did you know that a bunch of people did research into what different human emotions sound like and now I can make a depressed speech synthesizer, or, scarily, one which sounds more honest to people?
Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.
The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.
The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.
there's more problems then ever before that need empathetic humans to solve - are you up for the challenge - or you're doing a quick cash grab
due to people using machine gun approaches - spray & pray - we haven't forgotten how scalable human touch is -- yeah at first - you've to do things the manual way - reach out have a conversation - but slowly word spreads around without you spending money on ads | content etc
To be honest this is what is discouraging me from writing more novels right now. The only reason I'm even considering it is because the love of the craft is hooked firmly in my gullet. Were it not for that I'd drop writing faster than a lava potato...
"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge."
into
"One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff."
which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly.
____
I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms
> One of the great benefits as well as one of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
I'd paraphrase it with "said that" since the quotations indeed present as though verbatim.
>The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network
Social networks already is an existing competitive space and making it both paid and invite only obviously will hurt its adoption. I wouldn't have been surprised if this failed to get users even if it was free and even if this was preLLM. A brand new social network doesn't truly solve users problems.
Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software.
Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money.
We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications.
Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation.
There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.
This didn't happen for music.
It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.
To answer your question. Yes to a player already in a market with lack of funding, a billion dolars could be the necessary moat to win.
Money was, is and likely will be a moat for a while. But as a proxy, it may not be enough as a moat. Scarce resources may require more than money— e.g. IP classes or, if you're China, ASML machines.
* Attention span won't stop them recognizing a solution
* Numerous solutions won't stop them adopting one
* That the developer put little effort into building that solution won't put them off.
The real answer is of course that there's a lot of stuff that being built that doesn't solve people's problems people have, either because it targets a problem that doesn't really exist or because it fails to solve the problem it does target.
The result of the barrier to entry being erased is that prices will also be driven to 0 as products are commoditized
It's hardly worth going into a market when you're 1 of 1000 and profit margins are at 3%
Any creativity you add, new spin you put on it, new features, innovation.. all that has negligible cost to copy
I don't think we're quite there yet, but this is where it's quickly heading
So the attention was there but not the conversion.
Is the purpose of a computer program to use processing, network and memory? Or is it to handle and manipulate information to give results which are useful to people?
Now the moat of having memorized intentionally convoluted and complicated programming languages has been taken away. Exactly like the printing press removed the monopoly on information which was held exclusively by priests and monks.
When tools make a job easier, they open up new markets for people to do and sell things which were too costly to offer before. AI translation alone means that small businesses can open up several markets they didn't have any access to, broadening the number of potential customers immensely.
The only real fix is incredibly heavy taxation of income and wealth for the ultra rich individuals and ultra large companies. That is what will break through the money moat and create fair competition.
"Wrong side" means that people on that side have to work harder to reach us. The terms of the trade did not change because creators are not starting to pay us to get our attention. Well, it happens sometimes: free trials, free tiers, coupons, etc. but it's a well established practice. The post contains a reference to "do more marketing".
There must also be some value in advertising to the "eyeballs" of the AI? Even if they don't (yet) make that much decisions about spending, they do influence human decisions.
Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.
Maybe I just wasn't good at it.
That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.
Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.
Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.
Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.
This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an interesting or surprising result that building it resulted in little interested from general audiences.
People are flooded by new projects and assume (rightly) that most are low-signal, so they don’t engage. Because there’s low engagement, new projects get even less visibility. That reinforces the belief that nothing interesting can be built anymore.
I ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much.
The bottleneck isn’t building — it’s distribution and who already has an audience. Now dont get me started on getting an audience. thats a whole different pain.
But these new builders have a tool, they don’t suddenly have a newfound creativity.
I think with time we will stop seeing what we consider AI slop, simply because we know it’s not worth sharing. Instead great creative people will share very impressive things that simply wasn’t possible to build before.
saubeidl•2h ago
A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.
andsoitis•2h ago
lm28469•2h ago
saubeidl•1h ago
lm28469•1h ago
mothballed•2h ago
exceptione•2h ago
Wealth concentration is dangerous for democracy, the markets and society.
mothballed•2h ago
If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth largely by the railroads because they found it impossible to form a cartel to keep up prices (due to "secret" discounting) so instead they created regulation that outlawed the kind of discounting that breaks cartels apart. A similar thing happened in banking where the banks asked for a central bank to cartelize the interest ranks to stabilize their oligopoly. And the same in pharma industry -- big pharma loves high regulatory barriers because it keeps competitors out.
A large portion of the regulation in the US was brought about as regulatory capture by corporations to increase the monopolizing effects and destroy the free market.
exceptione•1h ago
One should understand the phenomenon as a common pattern of dynamics in unregulated markets. Not every snapshot will showcase an end state of monopolist dominated markets.
You bring up a valid point though. Regulatory capture is a indeed a weapon in the hands of anti-competitive players to prevent incumbents. Good policy usually applies differently to different strata: the small players are exempt from certain rules, or have to deal with less stringent ones than big players do, to prevent killing the market. At the risk of sounding like an llm: it is not just about policy, it is about good policy.
pixl97•34m ago
The food industry is filled with regional monopolies.
> cellular telephone service in Somalia
Ah yes, excellent example, all you have to do is completely destabilize your nation and you too can have free market capitalism.
Investors love monopolies, they fix prices and profits so their investments are not at risk. Investors hate too much competition, it lowers profits and puts their investments at risk.
Free markets need investors. Investors hate free markets. I hope you see the problem here.
saubeidl•1h ago