Code got cheap. Distribution got expensive.

There was a tweet by Leon Abboud doing the rounds last week, stating the "The era of the marketer has arrived" with a screenshot from the ClaudeAI sub.

The screenshot tells a story of a guy who'd built four iOS apps with Claude, has five more on the way, and wanted to save everyone some time: total revenue = $0, and a user count of two. His wife and some guy in Norway.

Building, by his telling, has stopped being the barrier. Getting users meanwhile, was never the same barrier, and nobody noticed because both felt impossible at the same time.

The quote-tweets and replies basically all come to the the same conclusion: building was the hard part for twenty-plus years, and now it’s so easy and accessible it almost feels free. So distribution was always the real game.

We talked about it on our call this week, mostly because it's the mirror image of the post you usually see. The usual version is "I built four apps and they all do $10k MRR with very little effort," which is the new dropshipping and usually not true.

At least this guy's honest, which is probably why it's making the rounds. And Leon's take has LOTR vibes.

We're not going to argue with the core of it. We're engineers who believed for years that if you build something good enough, people find it.

This isn’t the first or last time you'll hear us say it. We've also written a whole piece on it already, but the truth is, they just don't.

But I think the conclusion everyone's drawing stops one step short.

Harder and expensive are different problems

"Distribution is harder than ever" came up a few times in the replies. I don't know if that's true. Harder implies some skill wall got taller.

What's actually happening is simpler: every one of those newly shipped products is bidding for the same finite attention, so the price of a user goes up. Distribution is getting more expensive. Whether it's harder, I'm genuinely not sure.

The distinction matters because the two problems demand different responses. Harder means grind: post more, be everywhere, shout louder. Expensive means waste less.

And paying more per user does something useful. It kills a business model that was dumb the whole time. Madusha put it well on the call: the old ad network deal was "we charge this much for this many impressions," and neither side much cared who actually converted. When attention was cheap you could tolerate that and write the waste off as a cost of doing business.

You can't do that anymore. When a user costs real money, showing your ad to someone who was never going to convert becomes a problem, and adds up real quick. You need to be targeted, and past that, you need to know afterwards which part of the spend did the work.

Worth saying, btw: an ad was always an organic decision at the end of it. A real person saw a message and chose to try your thing, same as if a friend had recommended it. The paid part is the introduction. The conversion is still earned.

So the useful question was never about paid versus organic. It's whether you can tell which introductions led anywhere.

In web2, that question got answered with clicks and cookies. In crypto it mostly hasn't been answered at all, which is a big part of why teams here tried ads once, stared at a dashboard that couldn't see the conversion anyway, and concluded the channel was dead. Different piece, we've written that one too.

Cheap code raised the bar, it didn't lower it

The other side of this, is the bit the distribution-is-everything crowd skips, what cheap code did to the products themselves.

Madusha said something else on the call that stuck with me. We used to say ideas are free. Now code's cheap too. But being able to build something still doesn't equate to being able to sell it.

Users now know how easy the tools are to build, and their standards have increased with that knowledge. We're guilty of it ourselves. We've got a growing list of subscriptions we've cancelled this year because we rebuilt the tool internally, sometimes even in an afternoon.

So if your product is the kind of thing a stranger can vibe-code a replacement, distribution won't save it. People will come, use it for a bit, and bolt.

The honest version of the take is longer and less quotable. Building got cheap, which floods the market, which makes attention expensive, which punishes wasted spend, which ultimately rewards the teams who can measure what actually converted and then put every dollar behind that.

Distribution matters more than ever. And precisely because it does, the sloppy version of it is dying.

The guy with four apps and zero users doesn't need to shout louder. He needs to find out as quickly, cheaply and definitively as possible, which of the four anyone wants. If he's lucky, he gets to learn that lesson before he's paying for every user who shows up and then leaves.

Anyway. Next time someone tells you distribution is the game, ask them what a user costs them. The convo that follows is usually more interesting than the take that started it.