The Next Phase of the World Might Need More Marketers, Less Davids...
Building a product used to be hard.
You needed developers, infrastructure, technical co-founders, runway, a full team, just to build a working product that nobody wants. The barrier to entry was steep, and most people never made it past the idea stage.
AI changed that. Or at least, it’s changing it. Quietly, then all at once.
Today, you can have a working product in a weekend. With a database, user authentication, payment integration, and a decent UI. Most will argue that this is not scalable, but remember, you need at least one person to use your product first before you worry about scaling.
Lovable writes the code and claude helps you think through the logic. Which means a 32-year-old alcoholic can ship something that would have required a six-person engineering team three years ago.
And personally? I could start 10 companies per day right now if marketing and distribution were not a concern. Okay… I’m being dramatic, maybe 5. That’s still a lot, maybe 2?
I digress.
And Then You Finish Building…
You’ve shipped, the product works. You’re proud of it. You’re telling your nonchalant cousin about it, and funnily, this time, he seems chalant, then he asks, “So how do you get people to use it?”
And then it hits you.
“Oh. I never thought about that”, you naively replied.
And in a wave of sudden realisation, it dawned on you:
You need people to know this thing exists. Which means you need to reach people. Which means, God forbid, you need to market this thing.
Suddenly, the overwhelming list materialises in front of you like a curse.
Social media presence… okay, which platforms? All of them?
Content strategy… so you have to post consistently?
Video… wait, you have to be on camera? Ha, please don’t tell me you have to dance on TikTok?
Build in public… meaning tell strangers on the internet what you’re doing every day?
SEO… you need to write articles that Google likes, but nobody will read?
Paid ads… so you need to spend money to get users before you even know if they’ll pay you?
The product was the easy part. Nobody tells you that until you’ve already built the product.
Let’s Picture Some Dude Named ‘David’…
You know a David. Everyone knows a David.
The random dude with “Marketing Strategist | Growth Hacker | Brand Storyteller” in his LinkedIn bio. David talks a lot. He has strong opinions about ad funnels. And has a 2019 case study he references in every conversation.
David seems very confident.
You hire David. You give David $5,000 (your severance package), some creative freedom, and your genuine hope is that this will work.
David posts some things. David runs some ads. David sends you a report with a lot of numbers that somehow say nothing. David talks about “brand awareness” when you ask about customers. David has a theory about why the campaign underperformed that is very detailed and completely incomprehensible.
Zero customers. $5,000 gone. David is already pitching his next client and writing a case study about how he took your business from 0 to 100K in website traffic, leaving out the part where you got 0 sales.
The game is the game.
So What’s the Problem…
If building was hard before and is easier now, what happens next?
Everyone builds, obviously. Maybe not ‘everyone’, but still, the floodgates open. The number of products, apps, tools, platforms, SaaS startups, and AI wrappers launched per week will become genuinely overwhelming. It’s already getting there.
Which means the human you’re trying to reach is going to be absolutely suffocated with options.
Distribution gets harder when supply explodes. Because now you’re not just competing with the ten other companies in your category, you’re competing with every founder who woke up last Saturday and decided to build something.
So What Does This Actually Mean?
Unlike building a product, where you can genuinely get away with just Lovable and a weekend, marketing doesn’t have that equivalent yet. There is no “prompt your way to a successful GTM strategy” tool. No AI that can take your budget, shoot your videos, post your content, run your ads, read what’s working, adjust, and do it all over again, end to end, unsupervised. That doesn’t exist, yet. Or maybe I don’t know AI enough?
But my prediction is that the value of good marketers will go up in the near future.
Because the scarce resources will be people who can take what was built and make the world care about it, people who understand distribution, people who can create attention in a crowded room, people who know how to reach humans who are tired of being marketed to, and somehow still reach them.
Not that dude called David.
The world is about to be full of products and short on people who know how to move them.
If you’re already a good marketer, this is your moment. And if you’re thinking about what skill compounds in a world where everyone can build overnight… Just know, distribution is the new bottleneck.