Had a conversation with a friend recently that shifted how I think about AI and business.
He runs a marketing community. Smart guy. Built and sold companies. We were talking about whether to build software products using AI tools. Everyone’s doing it right now. Vibe coding is a thing. You can ship an app in a weekend.
His take was blunt: “If you go compete with all the people building apps 24/7, your median income drops. Code is basically free now.”
I’ve been thinking about that line ever since. Because he’s right. And I think most people in the AI space have this completely backwards.
Everyone’s Building. Nobody’s Distributing.
Right now, the default move in the AI world is: learn to build stuff. Ship an app. Launch a tool. Fork an open-source project and slap a UI on it. And the tools make it genuinely easy. You can build almost anything for almost nothing.
But building something nobody uses is easy. It’s always been easy. The hard part was never the code. Even before AI, the hard part was getting people to care.
Now that code is basically a commodity… that gap is even wider. The supply of software just exploded. But the supply of trust didn’t.
What Actually Wins Right Now
Look at the businesses doing well in the AI era. Not the venture-funded ones burning cash. The profitable ones. What do they have in common?
They have distribution. An audience. A brand. People who already trust them.
I see this in my own business every day. My workshops sell out not because I built the best AI product. They sell out because I spent years showing up. Writing content. Teaching for free. Building relationships in Austin. When I say “this tool works” or “this workflow saves time,” people believe me. Because they’ve seen me do it.
That trust is the moat. Not the code.
A Real Example
A friend of mine wanted to help a medical office brokerage reach building owners who might want to sell. Dermatologists, dentists, doctors.
We automated the whole thing with AI. Mined owner data into Google Sheets. Used agents to message prospects on LinkedIn. Before every sales call, the system automatically pulled comparable sales data for that specific property. The salesperson just needed two minutes to review the comps and they were ready.
Impressive system. But here’s the thing… it only worked because those salespeople already had credibility in that market. People picked up the phone because they recognized the company. The AI amplified what was already there. It didn’t create trust from zero.
If you gave that same automation stack to someone with no reputation and no relationships… it would be spam.
The Counterintuitive Move
So here’s what I’d tell anyone trying to figure out where to invest their time right now.
If you’re choosing between learning to code AI products and learning to build an audience… build the audience first.
Not because code doesn’t matter. It does. But because the bottleneck has shifted. Code used to be the hardest thing to do in business. It was expensive, slow, and required specialized talent. That made it the moat.
Now code is cheap and fast. What’s expensive and slow is building trust. Getting attention. Creating a brand people actually care about.
What This Means Practically
A few things I’d focus on if I were starting from scratch:
Create content in public. Share what you’re learning, building, and testing. Be specific. Show your work. People follow process, not polish.
Build relationships in a niche. Don’t try to be famous on the internet. Try to be known in one room. One industry. One city. That’s where trust compounds fastest.
Use AI to scale what’s already working. Once you have distribution, AI is incredible at amplifying it. Automating follow-ups. Personalizing outreach. Creating content faster. But it needs something real to amplify.
Don’t compete on product. Compete on positioning. If ten people can build the same app, the one who wins is the one people trust. That’s not a code problem. That’s a brand problem.
The Bottom Line
Play the people game. Build trust. Build an audience. Build a reputation in your space.
Then use AI to scale it.
Not the other way around.
