Everyone can build something incredible now – but can they sell it? We're living in a fascinating paradox. Thanks to AI, creating impressive products has never been easier, yet succeeding in business has arguably never been harder. This contradiction sits at the heart of what's reshaping entire industries and catching countless entrepreneurs off guard.

The Great Product Equaliser

The barriers to product creation have collapsed in ways that seemed impossible just months ago. It's very, very easy to create a product today if you know what you're doing. You don't need a lot of technical skills to code and within a couple of days you get a product which is up and running with payment gateway and you can take on clients. This isn't hyperbole – it's reality. Tools like Lovable can help you create an Uber-like app that mimics at least 80% of the original functionality. Of course you don't have the connections, you don't have the APIs, you don't have the brand and the recognition and the trust that Uber has, but you have a tool that works. Tools like Runway for video editing and Lumen5 for text-to-video conversion are democratising production capabilities that once required entire teams and substantial budgets. The technical moat that once protected established companies has largely evaporated.

The Distribution Reality Check

But here's where many entrepreneurs hit a wall they didn't see coming. There's one key thing about business which is acquiring customers. Selling is still key and that's true for the one man band who's starting today in their bedroom and is also true for the biggest players. This reality becomes crystal clear when you examine why OpenAI, despite having what many consider the best technology in their space, continues making strategic partnerships. There is a reason why OpenAI has made agreements with both Microsoft and Apple and it's not because of the technology. They already have the best technology there is for their specific niche today. They are the benchmark of the market... They are doing deals with Microsoft and Apple because of distribution. Meanwhile, Anthropic, which has arguably a product that's just as good, doesn't have as much distribution as OpenAI does. Therefore their market share is significantly smaller. The technology isn't the differentiator anymore – distribution is.

The Coming Automation Wave

What makes this shift even more dramatic is how quickly AI is automating traditional marketing and sales processes. Mark Zuckerberg has mentioned that within a few years or so meta platforms will handle all the advertising. We just go to them and say, look, I'm looking for leads to buy the product for this audience and they will handle everything, creatives, copy conversion, rate optimization, so on and so forth. If this vision materialises – and current trends suggest it will – then the tactical elements of customer acquisition become commoditised. When AI handles ad creation, targeting, and optimisation automatically, what separates winners from losers? Research indicates that 72% of enterprises now prioritise "audience personalisation" for customer acquisition, recognising that while AI can execute campaigns, the strategic understanding of customer needs remains distinctly human.

Why Brand Becomes Everything

As AI makes product creation easier and marketing execution more automated, brand emerges as the ultimate differentiator. Customer acquisition and branding will be the next big bets if you want to have a winner business. This shift is already visible in consumer behaviour. 68% of consumers prefer brands with "human-centric" storytelling amid the growing noise of AI-generated content. When everyone can create similar products and run similar campaigns, trust and recognition become the deciding factors. AI will also create a lot of and generate a lot of noise. A lot of people just put their content machine on auto and there will be a lot of crap out there. So customer acquisition and branding will be the next big bets if you want to have a winner business. The mathematics of this shift are compelling. In a world where everyone has access to similar AI tools, competitive advantage shifts from what you can build to how many people know and trust you.

The Founder-Led Marketing Renaissance

This reality explains why founder-led marketing is experiencing such a renaissance. Every major social media platform pushes personal content over brand content, sometimes by factors of six to one. Every single major social media platform pushes personal content over any brand content. In some cases, like LinkedIn, it can be up to six times more engagement from someone's page versus a brand's page. The reason this matters so much now is that people like to see a face. We engage with faces way more than we engage with logos and we trust them way more because we know that there is a person on the other side that may or may not understand us. Consider the example of Mia Murati, former CTO of OpenAI. She's left and now she's raising money for her own company. She doesn't have a product, she doesn't have anything at all. It's just herself. She's raised two billion dollars at a valuation of ten billion dollars. No product, nothing. Just on how people trust her. This demonstrates something fundamental about business that many overlook: How people perceive you and how much they trust you puts money in your pocket. That's as simple as that.

The Value Equation in an AI World

With products becoming easier to build and marketing becoming more automated, customer expectations are simultaneously rising to unprecedented levels. Customers' expectations are just through the roof. It has never been so high. We've become spoiled for choice and instant gratification. We now are able to click a couple of buttons on our phone and something shows up at our door within minutes. It has never been like that. Our addiction for dopamine is so high because the effort that we need to make to get something that we want has been getting shorter and shorter and shorter. In this environment, value becomes paramount, but value is multifaceted. It's not just about the product itself, but about the entire experience: how easy the solution is to discover, understand, purchase, and use. It's about whether customers feel understood without having to explain themselves. There will be a lot more value for money out there. The market, the competition will get even crazier than it has been so far, which is good for customers, because we're going to be even more spoiled. There will be even more options, there will be even more tailored solutions for our specific problems.

The Niche Opportunity

Paradoxically, as AI makes general solutions easier to build, it also makes highly specialised solutions more viable. Someone can own a very specific niche and it will become commercially viable for them to produce something that is very custom made to just a few customers, because the cost for production is shrinking on a daily basis. This creates opportunities for businesses to serve incredibly specific market segments that were previously too small to be profitable. AI's cost reduction makes micro-niches economically viable in ways they never were before.

Why Clarity Becomes Critical

In this rapidly evolving landscape, one of the biggest mistakes businesses make is a lack of strategic clarity. So many businesses, so many founders and very experienced ones, they have absolutely no clarity of what exactly they want with marketing. This might seem obvious – of course they want to grow their business and increase sales. But there's so many ways that you can get to the same result. And those ways must be tied to your business objectives. Research shows that 62% of AI-augmented projects face delays due to unclear objectives, highlighting how crucial defined metrics are for successful AI implementation. The fundamental questions that many businesses can't answer clearly:

• What are your specific KPIs for the next quarter and six months?

• What makes you different from competitors?

• What's your unique selling proposition?

• How much are you willing to invest to achieve specific growth targets?

You can increase revenue by increasing your price and then branding is very important here and positioning, or you can increase your revenue by acquiring new customers and then reach is probably more important. Or you can increase your revenue by upselling and cross selling. Without clarity on these fundamentals, no amount of AI sophistication will solve your growth challenges.

The Network Effect Advantage

While AI levels the playing field in many ways, one advantage remains distinctly human and incredibly powerful: network effects. What's the one key thing that I see in every successful founder? People know them. People know them. This observation aligns with research from "The Luck Factor," which shows that the more people you interact with and the more visible you are, the more opportunities come your way. It all boils down to first, getting to know more people, talking to more people, being more extroverted because it makes you more likable... And secondly, be an optimist. The mathematics are simple: more connections lead to more opportunities, more referrals, and more trust. In an AI world where products can be replicated quickly, relationships become the persistent competitive advantage.

The Execution Imperative

Despite all the technological advancement and strategic considerations, success still comes down to execution. Execution matters more than the idea. Although having a vision is important, getting things done for this week and the next are even more important than thinking about five years from now. This focus on immediate execution becomes even more critical in the AI era because if you don't get things done within the next thirty days, you won't make it to five years. The pace of change means that theoretical advantages disappear quickly. The businesses that survive and thrive are those that can rapidly test, learn, and adapt their distribution strategies while building genuine relationships with their customers.

The Path Forward

The future belongs to businesses that understand this new reality: product creation is table stakes, distribution is king, and brand is the crown jewel. AI will continue to democratise production capabilities, but it will simultaneously make human elements like trust, relationships, and brand more valuable than ever. The winners won't be those with the best AI tools – those tools will quickly become commoditised. The winners will be those who use AI to enhance their human capabilities while focusing relentlessly on customer acquisition, brand building, and execution. In a world where anyone can build anything, the question isn't what you can create – it's whether anyone will care enough to buy it and tell others about it.