"Suddenly, the whole universe has shifted." – Mikkel Malmberg, macOS app developer
The world of software development has fundamentally changed. AI and tools like Claude Code are empowering more people than ever to write and ship code.
In the next few years, we'll see more product launches than ever before.
But while building is getting easier, marketing is going to get harder. All those new apps and features being launched will mean customers will be inundated with announcements, ads, and pitches. Folks already feel overwhelmed with the number of messages they get every day; it's only going to get worse.
In the age of AI, marketing is the new superpower.
As my friend Tyler King says, “Building apps was never the hardest part; distribution was.” In a world of AI-generated apps, reaching and connecting with customers is what gives you leverage.
AI is bad at marketing
In my experience, LLMS (like Claude and ChatGPT) give terrible marketing advice.
Why? Marketing is standing out; it's about rising above the noise so people take notice of you and investigate further.
Because of how they are trained and how we use them, LLMs have a strong "gravitational pull" toward the most common, safe, and probable patterns.
This means the tactics and approaches that ChatGPT (and other tools) suggest will be basic, washed-out, and average. Average is what kills companies.
With so much noise, potential customers won't notice an average product being marketed in an average way.
Case study: asking ChatGPT for marketing advice
I recently saw a clip of a founder asking a business influencer for advice on promoting his trading card vending machine business.
The influencer's answer was to pull out his phone and speak to ChatGPT: "Hey ChatGPT, give me five really powerful ideas that would make me the most money (as fast as possible) for my vending machine business."
ChatGPT replied with these ideas:
- "Interactive AR experiences. Integrate augmented reality features into your vending machines."
- "AI-powered personalization. Use AI to analyze purchasing patterns and offer personalized recommendations or discounts via the vending machine interface."
- "Mobile app integration. Develop a companion mobile app that lets users track their purchases, earn rewards, and be notified about new stock or limited-time offers."
The influencer was trying to make a point: "See? Marketing is easy now that we have ChatGPT."
But these ideas are generic and don't fit this founder or his product category.
This owner owns simple "gumball style" slot machines; it's not practical to add augmented reality, AI personalization, or a mobile app here. Also, these ideas sound like expensive, time-consuming, risky bets.
What gives any business an advantage in a market is how well they understand the market. Every market has characteristics that determine how you should approach it.
What makes the difference? The founder, how well they understand the market, and what built-in advantages they have.
Founder mode
Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, describes the characteristics of founders who win in a given market:
"You need to have excellent judgment in your problem area."
Good judgment is the result of your experience, wisdom, and insight. It's the intuition you've developed by building things and observing how real customers behave.
You need to develop a keen sense of judgment and pair it with a relentless determination.
It's the combination of excellent judgment and drive in the founder that creates a certain "magic" that results in success.
Take, for example, my friend Adam Wathan. Even while employed at an agency, he developed a reputation for dogmatically pursuing solutions and bulldozing through difficult problems. He also developed a knack for identifying the "pull" of a market. It was his insight and drive that eventually led him to launch his course, Refactoring to Collections, which ultimately generated over $100,000 in revenue. He didn't stop there. He later teamed up with Steve Schoger and released a design course, Refactoring UI, which generated over $1.35 million in its first two years. He didn't stop there! He released Tailwind CSS and subsequently a highly successful Tailwind Plus product (design components). And then, catastrophe struck: LLMs took away their primary marketing channel (search traffic to their documents), resulting in an 80% revenue loss. What did Adam do? He regrouped, and now he and Steve are launching a new product: ui.sh – "A toolkit for coding agents like Claude Code, Amp, Cursor, OpenCode, and Codex to help you build UIs that don't suck."
Anyone who knows Adam knows that he has a keen sense for what developers want. His antenna is tuned for good taste and for recognizing what's important for his customers. At the same time, he's driven. More than anyone I know, he will go out of his way to find answers to the problems and questions he faces. He has no hesitation in contacting people or getting them on the phone to gain insight into a challenge he's encountered.
Adam is a perfect example of "founder mode." If you want to succeed, you'll need to develop your own "founder magic" (or partner with someone who has it). You have to want it! Founders who understand their customers better, can make sound decisions, and pursue a market rigorously have a significant advantage over their competitors.
Only two marketing paths.
The consensus in marketing right now is that there are only two ways to acquire customers:
- Paid acquisition – running ads on Google, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, but mostly on Instagram.
- Organic – a mixture of SEO, AI search optimization, social, PR, content, but with largely with a focus on founder-led marketing and getting a large footprint across social platforms, review platforms, etc.
Lars Lofgren, who's done marketing for companies like Automattic and Crazy Egg, put it to me bluntly: "You either have to be the influencer, or you're gonna pay the influencer. That's where marketing is going, because AI's eaten up all the other channels."
There used to be a reliable middle path. You could build a halfway decent blog, invest in SEO, get some organic traffic flowing, and convert visitors into customers. That playbook is in decline. AI has raised the floor on content quality to the point where if you just do "average," you might as well let AI do it. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's noise on noise.
On the paid side, Lars is seeing big B2B companies slash their organic budgets and pile everything into Google Ads and paid channels. The problem? When everyone does that simultaneously, the cost per customer increases. "Paid is very much zero-sum," Lars told me. "Are you willing to burn more cash than your competitor? Yes or no?"
There's a sweet spot with paid early on: when you're unknown, you can get a targeted flow of customers at a reasonable cost. However, the economics get worse as you scale. The best customers come on day one. Every dollar you spend after that gets you a less interested, less committed prospect.
That leaves organic. And in 2026, the heart of organic marketing is the founder. We'll dig into both paths in the following chapters, but the key insight is this: the old organic playbook (write content → rank on Google → get traffic → convert) has been disrupted. What's replacing it is messier, harder to measure, and more personal. It requires you, the founder, to show up.