Distribution for vibe-coded apps

Something genuinely changed in the last couple of years. Building software went from a specialist skill with a long apprenticeship to something a determined person can do in a weekend with a coding agent and some patience. That’s not hype; look at how many working products get posted every day.

What didn’t change is the number of hours in anyone’s day, or the number of things they’re willing to try. The supply of software went up enormously. The supply of attention did not move at all.

The bottleneck moved and nobody updated the advice

For twenty years, the standard startup advice was built on the assumption that building was the hard, expensive, risky part. “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything.” “Just ship.” “Talk to users” came third, after you’d got the thing built.

When building is cheap, shipping stops being an achievement and starts being the entry fee.

The result is a very large number of people in a specific and under-served position: they have a working, deployed, genuinely useful product, and no idea what to do on Monday morning.

Three things that are different now

One: “we built it” is no longer a story. Build-in-public worked partly because building was interesting. It’s much less interesting when everyone is doing it. What’s still interesting is the problem — who has it, what it costs them, what you learned about it.

Two: the competition isn’t other startups. For most vibe-coded products the real alternative is a spreadsheet, a group chat, or nobody bothering. That’s good news — those are much easier to displace than a funded incumbent — but it changes what you say. You’re not arguing you’re better than a rival. You’re arguing this is worth changing a habit for.

Three: speed of iteration is now a distribution advantage. If someone in a forum says “I’d use this if it did X”, you can plausibly reply the next day saying it does. Almost nobody exploits this. It’s the one genuine edge the new tooling hands you on the marketing side rather than the building side.

What hasn’t changed at all

• People still only look for things when something has gone wrong.
• They still describe their problem in their own words, not your category’s.
• They still ignore anything that looks like an ad.
• They still trust a specific, useful answer from a person more than anything else.

Which means the fundamentals are, annoyingly, exactly what they always were. The difference is that far more people now need them, and almost none of them came up through a route that taught them.