TLDR: When anyone can ship a working product in a weekend, durable advantage shifts to whoever owns the path to the customer, so founders who treat reaching people as a discipline win the market.
Cheap software turns the product into the easy part of the job
I have built and backed enough companies to notice a pattern that keeps getting stronger: the hard, expensive, defensible part of a startup has moved. A decade ago, standing up a reliable product took a real team, months of work, and meaningful capital. Today a small group with modern tooling and generative models can assemble something usable in days. When I look at early pitches now, the demo almost always works. The founders can build. What they often cannot answer is how the next ten thousand people will ever hear about it.
That shift matters because advantage lives wherever the scarcity is. When production is scarce, building well is the moat. When production is abundant, the scarce resources become attention, trust, and access to buyers. I treat a polished product as table stakes now, and I spend my diligence time on the question that actually predicts survival: does this team have a repeatable way to reach the people it wants to serve.
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