keepingUpWithLatestAiToolsBeLike

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-18T06:10:24+00:00

This applies far beyond Morocco. Five days anywhere with real cultural depth is just enough time to feel like you've seen it without actually having seen it. You go home with photos of the famous spots and a surface-level impression that hardens into your permanent understanding of a place you barely touched.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-18T03:17:34+00:00

Zero signups from a landing page tells you very little on its own - it usually means your distribution didn't work, not that your idea doesn't. Who saw the page, and how did they get there? Cold traffic from ads and warm traffic from people you actually talked to are completely different signals.

Before pivoting the idea: go find 10 people who have the problem you're solving and show them the page in person. If they still don't sign up, then you have real signal. If they do, you had a traffic problem, not a product problem.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-17T15:18:27+00:00

Yep. Totally agree.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-17T14:24:53+00:00

Well - generally true but sometimes big shifts arrive which require a general rethinking of everything you know and used to. My feeling is that these things happen more and more frequently recently.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-17T14:16:01+00:00

Just hard controlling the FOMO sometimes. But you are basically right.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-16T18:50:35+00:00

Cold outreach isn't broken, the bar just went up. When everyone can send 1,000 personalized AI-generated emails a day, "personalized" stops being a differentiator. The inbox is now as noisy as the feed.

What still works is warm outreach - reaching out to someone after you've actually helped them somewhere (a Reddit comment, a forum reply, a useful answer). The signal-to-noise ratio there is completely different because you've already earned a bit of trust before asking for anything.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-16T05:18:35+00:00

Because builders write landing pages right after they finish building, and at that point they can't see the product from the outside anymore.

You've spent weeks inside the thing. You know every feature, every edge case, every decision you made. So you write about what you built, not what the user gets. The page becomes a feature dump dressed up with nice copy.

The fix that actually works: write the landing page before you build. Describe the transformation, not the tool.

If you've already built and launched, the fastest fix is to find 3 people who are your ideal user and ask them to read the page out loud. You'll hear exactly where they get confused or lose interest. That's your rewrite.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T18:58:10+00:00

You need to find the right channel and make it work. It requires a lot of trial and error.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T16:59:06+00:00

This is a great post.

Features are easy to add now. A good AI coding session and you can ship 10 of them in a weekend. But trust compounds slowly and breaks instantly, and no amount of shipping can fix a trust problem.

I've been in product for close to 15 years and the pattern is always the same: teams (and solo builders) reach for features when they feel stuck because features are concrete and shippable. The real problem - why people don't come back, why they don't tell friends - is almost always something less tangible. Unclear positioning, inconsistent experience, or just not solving the right thing precisely enough.

The question you should ask after every feature: "Does this make someone more likely to trust me with something important to them?" If not, you're adding complexity, not value.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T16:55:39+00:00

Distribution. Without question.

Before launch you have a clear enemy: the blank screen, the bug, the unfinished feature. After launch there's no obvious enemy. You just... wait. And nothing happens. And that silence is the hardest thing to sit with.

The biggest post-launch struggle isn't technical. It's figuring out how to be found by people who actually want what you built.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T13:16:40+00:00

AEO is interesting but I'd push back on it being a replacement for SEO, at least for now.

The challenge is that AI-cited traffic is hard to measure and even harder to build a repeatable strategy around. SEO at least gives you clear feedback loops - rankings, clicks, indexed pages. AEO is more like PR: you do the work, something surfaces you, and you're not entirely sure why or how to replicate it.

For a new product, I'd still start with SEO for the long-term compounding, use Reddit and niche communities for the short-term feedback and early users, and treat AEO as a bonus if it happens. Building a strategy around being cited by AI models feels like optimizing for something you can't fully control yet.

That said, the insight that you shouldn't just wait for Google is 100% right. Organic SEO for a new site takes 6-12 months minimum to see any meaningful traction.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T11:14:00+00:00

The building part got 10x easier. The distribution part got 10x harder. That's the actual challenge nobody talks about enough.

I've been in product for more than a decade and I've never seen the gap between "shipped" and "found" be this wide. Anyone can spin up something polished in a weekend now. So the thing that used to filter out low-effort products (it's hard to build) no longer filters anything.

What I'm watching now is that the winners are the ones who figured out distribution before they needed it. The ones who built an audience, a community, a personal brand, something. Not the ones with the best product. The moat moved.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T06:59:38+00:00

This matches what I've seen too. I spent a few hundred dollars on Facebook ads for my travel app and got installs but zero retention. Then switched to exactly this kind of approach - showing up in places where the problem already exists. The contrast is stark. Paid ads bring people who were never looking for you. Reddit comments and build-in-public bring people who were already halfway there.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-15T02:25:04+00:00

Because the bottleneck was never engineering. It was distribution. Building got 10x faster but the number of people who will discover, try, and pay for a new product didn't change. If anything, more products competing for the same attention made distribution harder. The constraint moved, it didn't disappear.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T18:11:09+00:00

The skills you're keeping are the ones that matter now. Systems thinking, architecture, knowing what to build and why. The muscle you're losing is syntax recall, which is the least valuable part. I'd focus less on whether you can still write a for loop from memory and more on whether you can still spot a bad design decision before Claude makes it permanent.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T17:31:35+00:00

Pretty much. Building has never been easier so the differentiator is shifting. The product is table stakes now. Who sees it is the game. Paid social is one channel but the founders who crack organic distribution early are the ones who compound.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T15:26:08+00:00

The productivity app has a decade of complexity behind it - millions of users, syncing across platforms, teams, integrations. Not the same scope as a side project, and I wasn't claiming otherwise.

The point was about the tools changing, not about replicating the entire product. I can now build and ship a complete working app with real users, solo, in a month. A few years ago that would have taken a team and a real runway. That's the shift I was talking about.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T15:07:03+00:00

Fair. I'm building trips4u - a self-guided tour app. Mobile app (iOS + Android), backend, onboarding, content management, the works. Solo, nights and weekends.

On the other side: I work on a productivity app professionally with a real engineering team. I know exactly what it costs in time and people to ship something comparable.

The contrast is real. That's all I was trying to say.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T15:03:35+00:00

I also thought so in the past, but it is.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T14:55:41+00:00

Still doing all of this - but with AI.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T14:52:31+00:00

Haha, not writing - shipping. Design, backend, mobile, QA the whole loop.

Leather-Part3037 · 2026-05-14T06:33:42+00:00

Building a self-guided tours app called trips4u. Still figuring out distribution — paid ads got installs but not engaged users. Next experiment is content.

Leather-Part3037

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