With tech tutorials flooding the streaming platforms and every next person you meet being a software developer (or planning to become one), technology is getting commoditized. At least the ones over which the current multi-billion dollar platforms are built upon. We find ourselves in a sea of open-source projects, all built with the same building blocks in some sense. It didn’t take LLMs long to figure out the patterns and start coding in a near-human level capacity. The future may still be a little further when anyone who wants to code, can code. But we are almost there, as almost anyone who wants to code can code and build products right now. Knowledge is available for free on the Internet.

Whatever a small team can build, a giant organization or someone else can build very easily as well (with some exceptions). And this is a common practice, follow a small startup, and if the idea sounds interesting enough just copy it. I realized this when I made a small website summarization plugin using OpenAI APIs, and although there were a lot of plugins already available only a few were with the most downloads and were getting shared everywhere. The key is to differentiate. And to differentiate you need attention. If a guy with 100K followers releases a beta, he instantly gets 50-100 customers while a guy with a much better product gets 1-2 and they churn out eventually. In this day and age, attention is one of the very strong moats any business can have. Whether it’s a newsletter, YouTube channel, or Twitter account, as long as it has the right audience it has a potential revenue stream.

Big businesses (especially big tech) have realized this and are buying media houses left and right. Hustle’s acquisition by Hubspot is an example of this. Although big businesses don’t have to worry too much about generating revenue but having a media arm that connects with the audience in a genuine manner is very important. People see an ad from a mile away. This is the new approach of creating a community, buy an existing one. The smart move for current entrepreneurs I believe too is to create a community that they can monetize or at the very least try to develop a following.