Software was never the bottleneck. Distribution was always the problem!

A lot of people bought into the whole AI aided solopreneurship after Altman and Dario promised everyone the end of capitalism as we know it.

For me personally, those claims never made sense. 20 years ago, if you wanted more software you just hired more people. Software was not the bottleneck. Is it slightly faster to produce software today with AI at the cost of long term code quality? yes. but consider the following…

The irony of it all:

While the product moat keeps trending toward zero due to AI and labor oversupply, distribution is actually getting harder for the exact same reasons!

Spam, alongside coding, are the two main use-cases of AI. Both sides of the equation are under pressure. Many of you reading this use AI to create content, enrich emails, or send DMs, etc.

This is a big problem. Channels like UGC, paid ads, influencer marketing, direct outreach etc, are all getting flooded with spam. 5 years ago you could easily run a bad email campaign and get response rates that top marketers today could only dream of.

That’s the big irony: AI made coding faster but as a tradeoff both moat and distribution quality were sacrificed. We’re basically sitting on ever-expanding piles of useless code.

This leads me to my prediction for the next 5 years:

Customer Acquisition Cost will continue to rise across the board. Ads will become more expensive. Social impressions will continue to decline. Social media companies will tighten their algos even harder.

What we really need is AI/spam resistant distribution channels. What would that look like I hear you ask? well stay tuned!