The hardest part of a product used to be making it. Now it is getting one person to care.
For centuries, turning an idea into something people could buy took time, money and skills, whatever the product. Most ideas never made it. That has changed. Moving from idea to usable product has never been so easy. AI has let a whole generation of builders ship products without writing a line of code or modeling a part in CAD. We have entered the age of vibe building — shipping by prompting, iterating by talking to a model — and it is reshaping software, design and small-scale manufacturing.
It started in tech, naturally. Apps and SaaS products appeared by the thousands. A handful turned out to be great. Most were, and still are, slop.
But the real shift is elsewhere. When anyone can build, building stops being the bottleneck. Distribution does. The people who need your product can now build a version of it themselves, tailored to their exact use case. It will be worse than yours. They will use it anyway, because it is good enough, and good enough is cheaper than buying. Your competitor is no longer just another startup. It is also your customer, with a weekend and a few good prompts.
LLMs can give you solid GTM advice. They can draft the positioning, the landing page and the outreach sequence. But they can't execute all of it. They can't earn trust, show up in the right room, or get a stranger to answer your email.
I'm living this myself.
I built Dentanorme, one of my many side projects: a SaaS for dental practices. It is cheaper than the tools they use today, and designed around how a practice actually works day to day. I did everything I could without paying to get in front of my target's eyeballs: programmatic SEO, GEO so AI assistants cite it, and steady organic content. The traffic is real and keeps growing.
But going from one user to a thousand at this pace would take years. Organic is a slow compounding game. Dental practices are conservative buyers who trust their peers, their suppliers and their trade shows more than a search result. Paid channels, partnerships and field presence buy time and trust, and no prompt can replace them.
That is the new asymmetry. I can build in weeks what once took a team a year. Getting found by the people who need it still takes the same old things: money, relationships and patience.
So what sets a product apart once the code is a commodity? What gets it found and bought:
- Distribution: an audience, a community or a channel you own before you launch.
- Trust: a name people recognize, and proof that you'll still be there in a year.
- Taste: knowing what not to build, and caring about details no prompt asks for.
- Depth: a real understanding of a customer's problem, beyond what a generic tool can guess.
The age of vibe building gave everyone the power to create. It didn't give everyone the power to be found. The next winners won't be the best builders. They will be the ones who solve distribution, whether by capital, community or craft.
