Trying my hand at distribution for my app AuraTracker: Habits & Goals and man, it’s hard.
I’ve been an engineer all my life, and all I knew was how to build stuff. Now, suddenly, I find that in the post-AI world, success is determined less by engineering effort and more by distribution effort.
AI has leveled the playing field for everyone.
It doesn’t matter whether your tech stack is Python, Java, C#, or JavaScript. AI can build with any of them. A few years ago, if you wanted to build an iOS app, you needed to know Swift or React Native. If you wanted to build for Android, you needed Kotlin or React Native. There were clear categories of builders: frontend developers, backend developers, mobile developers, devops experts and so on.
Now those lines are starting to blur.
Your programming language is increasingly becoming English. Point your latest GenAI subscription at a tool, any tool, big or small, describe what you want, and it can generate a surprisingly large portion of the application for you. The barriers to building software have fallen rapidly.
So how do you stand out?
Distribution. That seems to be the new competitive advantage.
UGC. Influencer marketing. Creating reels every day. Posting via dozens of accounts. Chasing attention wherever it exists. At-least per the many $10,000/MRR generating dudebros of Twitter !
But I absolutely hate doing that.
I have no intention of becoming a content creator. I don’t particularly enjoy posting UGC online, and I certainly don’t enjoy making videos. But there’s little value in building something if it simply disappears behind all the noise.
It that’s the issue with D2C. B2B comes with its own set of nuances. From the outside, it looks cleaner than the attention-driven world of D2C. But it comes with its own challenges. Networks matter. Relationships matter. Your pedigree and alumni matter.
You can build the most incredible fintech product, but if no accountant answers your calls, or the CFO forwards your email straight to spam, it doesn’t matter how good the product is, it’ll die out eventually. And through some sheer luck, if you do manage to get your foot in the door, there’s another challenge waiting for you.
You have to convince the business guy you are interacting with, that the app, tool, or AI agent you’ve built won’t simply be replaced directly by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever the next model happens to be a few months from now.
To summarize, it increasingly feels like it doesn’t matter how good an engineer you are. What matters is how good you are at cracking distribution and standing out amidst all the noise.
That’s the frustrating realization.
The ability to build software, once a scarce and highly valuable skill, is becoming increasingly commoditized. AI is lowering the barriers to creation every day. More people can build, more products are being launched, and more ideas are competing for the same limited attention.
I quit my job hoping to spend my time building things I genuinely wanted to build. But it turns out you can no longer make a living by just building. In fact, in the post AI world, it’s the least important part of the equation.
An amazing product with no marketing is invisible.
A mediocre product with exceptional distribution will standout and win.
That’s the world we live in today.
So it looks like I have a lot to learn. Maybe it’s time to take off the engineer hat and put on the hat of a salesman, marketer, GTM engineer or whatever the modern title is in the post-AI world. i.e., If I’ve to thrive in this Post AI startup world.
PS: If you’ve made it this far, do have a look at my app: AuraTracker: Habits & Goals. Its on 50% discount now through June.