Will getting 500 users in 2030 be as hard as getting a full stack app built in 2010?
I am truly blown away by these AI coding assistants. I have messed around with v0 and now am playing with Lovable. This feels like it should be illegal. I'm essentially coding full stack apps without having any knowledge of programming. Yes, there is a small gap on the deploying front but my guess is this will be solved for quickly.
My main question is where does this trend lead to? I don't believe that everyone will be able to program in a year, but potentially anyone with agency will be able to. I am having a hard time visualizing that, but if true, does that mean the golden goose is going to be on the marketing/distribution side? Will it be 10x harder to get users than it is today? Will getting 500 users in 2030 be as hard as getting a full stack app up in 2010, because every "idea guy" can now build? How will investors evaluate talent? Or big companies? Or am I totally off base here?
I don't know any of these answers, but i'm blown away by this technology and would love some additional thoughts from the great people of Product Hunt.
Product Hunt
My thesis is that with AI reducing the time (and agency) needed to build and validate ideas, the noise is going to go off the charts and that distribution will be the only thing that matters. This was probably always the case, but is just more apparent now. I can't imagine VCs are wooed by a great demo anymore and it makes their job much easier as picking winners will be defined by a team's ability to sell and scale with limited resources. This has the biggest impact in early stage rounds and filters for teams with the most hustle/grit.
But I don't think that means building is dead. "Coding" was never the hard part. The hard part was doing the work to talk to users to make something people actually want and then actually building it. "There's probably an AI for that" but I think more often than not, this is where real, lasting companies are made. I think we'll see lean, super effective teams that scale as quick as anything we've seen before. This has already happened, too, with Cursor becoming the quickest app in history to $100M.
But broadly, I think that means the winners here will be Open AI/Meta/Amazon/Nvidia/Google/Microsoft as they're the funnel for ad-spend/compute and are broadly turning into the picks and shovels for the next generation of software.
Some other stuff I think about:
How do ads get integrated into LLMs? Is this another $T of market cap for someone or a non-starter?
How does everyone becoming 10x more productive impact the labor market?
How do we raise kids in a world that we're unable to predict?