It is crazy how much distribution matters. Here is a hot story of how a guy made almost $100,000 in less than two days with a simple bidding website.
Jonathan built a bidding platform where anyone can claim the top position by simply bidding more than the previous person did. The prize is a link to your website. That's it.
However, the post got viral, and the top bid as of writing this post is at $12,669, which brings lifetime revenue of this hobby project to $98,501 and over a million visitors, in just two days. (stats taken from the website's /about page).
The story doesn't stop here, because others started feeling the FOMO and suddenly everyone was building bidding websites like crazy.
Some of them were exact copies. Others tried to niche down by making a bidding website for
- Mobile apps
- Newsletters
- AI apps
- Claiming the countries of the world (a popular one)
And many more, unique ideas. Most of these never got any traction, but some of them managed to cash in a couple hundred bucks, especially where slots were still cheap.
I also bought Hungary on the world map for $6 just for fun, and pointed it to landgrab.lol, my version of the gold rush.
And the lesson?
AI made experimenting cheap. Building a fun project like this takes a couple of hours, with real transactions wired in, serving real visitors, having an eye-catching design. Literally anyone can do this now.
But it doesn't matter if your product cannot reach people. If you don't have a way to get eyes on your product, it doesn't matter what you vibe-coded over the weekend.
Also, it is interesting to see that everyone is going crazy about automating software development with coding agents when it wasn't the bottleneck in the first place. Getting real users was.
And there are much fewer AI products that successfully automate or make marketing/sales easier. Because that is about people and the connections between them. You write an email with an — in it and you lost your prospect right away.
Automate the exploration phase first. Let your agent collect information about the prospect, but write the email yourself. You still offloaded the hard part to AI.