I mean this chart pretty much summarizes what I wanted to say, but let me spell it out anyway.
First let’s back up. What is this post about? A lot of people recently have been talking about how AI coding or vibe coding has enabled people to create so many different products and apps and websites and so on, but not many of them are generating revenue or actually succeeding. And the reason for this is simple: while ai-coding removed the barrier to building products, it has not and will likely not, meaningfully remove the barriers to succeeding in business, which has a lot to do with the competence and quality of the founders.
This is how the world looked like before AI coding: Many people had ideas, but a lot of them are bad ideas. Whenever friends of mine used to pitch me product ideas, I used to tell them that many people have an idea for an app, but few people have an idea for a business. And then for those few who had a good idea for a business, they had to clear the first barrier or challenge of building their idea and bringing it to life. So they had to either have the technical competence themselves, or they had to hire people to do it. And out of the ideas that get built, one still had to go through the traditional hurdles of actually getting a business off the ground. So figuring out how to get their first customers, figuring out scalable distribution, and generally just all the hassle of the zero-to-one kind of work. And this is the famous graveyard of startups. A lot of startups, are inherently high risk and they never get off the ground. People widely accepted that most startups never go from zero to one.
So what vibe coding did was it removed that barrier of building the idea. So anyone can build their idea for < $200/mo. So what you get is a much higher volume of ideas getting built. It is no longer a subset of the good ideas that get built, but rather all the ideas get build, including a very large volume of bad ones. But what happens afterwards? You still have the same hurdles of getting things off the ground, zero to one, finding distribution, getting customers, making revenue, are all still the same. But now we have a much larger denominator, the graveyard is going to be so big, yet a few ideas will eventually make it, adapt, grow, and succeed, following the natural order of the world of business.