Building is free. Customers still cost everything.
Vibe coding solved the easy problem. The hard one hasn't changed.
Open your feed right now. Count the “look what I built this weekend” posts.
I’ll wait.
My algorithm has been feeding me the same thing for months. People building apps with Cursor, shipping MVPs in a weekend, solving problems that sound a lot like the problems I’m solving. Same tools. Same categories. Same “just launched, check it out” energy.
And almost nobody is talking about what happens after.
Because building is the part that feels like progress. You’re in the zone. Features are taking shape. The UI gets a little cleaner with every pass. You ship something, screenshot it, and post it, and people say “nice.” That dopamine is real.
Finding someone who actually wants the thing you built? That doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like begging.
I know because I avoided it for months.
I built Leafed, a book discovery app, earlier this year. React Native, Expo, all the modern tools. Building was genuinely fun. I could knock out a new feature in a few hours and feel a sense of accomplishment.
So I kept doing that. New filters. Better transitions. A more polished onboarding flow. Every feature I added was a feature nobody asked for, because I hadn’t really talked to anyone using it.
I need to name this for what it was. Perfectionism disguised as productivity. I told myself I was improving the app. I was actually avoiding the harder, scarier work of finding strangers who might care about it.
Posting on social media felt like marketing. But my posts were competing against hundreds of other “check out my app” posts from people using the same tools to solve similar problems. Standing out in that crowd takes real effort, strategy, and consistency. Not just a link drop with a screenshot.
350 downloads later, I got my first organic app store review.
One person. Out of 350. And it was a rush. Not because of the number, but because someone I’d never met used my app and took time to write actual feedback. They found a gap in my data architecture that I’d completely missed, something I turned into a real feature.
One stranger’s feedback was worth more than every feature I’d built on my own instincts.
Vibe coding changed the wrong equation.
Building used to be the bottleneck. You had an idea, you needed months and money to make it real. That constraint was painful, but it did something useful. It forced you to validate first. When building costs three months of your life, you make damn sure somebody wants it before you start.
Now building costs a weekend. That’s incredible. It’s also dangerous.
Because when shipping is cheap, you skip the part where you sit across from someone and ask, “Would you use this?” You skip the part where you find out your idea doesn’t land the way you thought. You skip the uncomfortable work that actually determines whether your product has a future.
Instead, you just build another feature. And another. And another.
The saturation is already here. My feeds are full of people building similar apps in similar categories with similar tools. Most of them will have the same experience I had with Leafed. Weeks of building, a handful of downloads, silence.
Not because what they built is bad. Because the hard problem was never building. It was always getting someone to care.
What this means if you’re building right now.
Whether you’re shipping a side project, launching something for real, or trying to stand out in a job market that increasingly values “builder” credentials, the math has changed in a way most people haven’t caught up with.
Building signals effort. It used to signal commitment. Now that anyone can ship a working app in a weekend, the build itself isn’t the differentiator anymore. What you learned from real users is. What you changed in response to feedback is: Whether anyone came back a second time.
If you’re a PM trying to show you can build, that’s table stakes now. Show me you can get someone to use what you built. Show me you spoke with 20 people and adjusted your approach based on their feedback. That’s the skill that didn’t get cheaper.
I don’t want Leafed to make money. I want the people who try it to love it. That one review taught me more about what “love it” means than 50 features I built in isolation.
Before you ship your next thing, ask yourself three questions.
Who are the first ten people you’ll put this in front of, and do you know their names?
What will you do in week two when no one is downloading it and posting about it feels pointless?
Are you building because you validated something, or because building feels better than the alternative?
That last one is the hard one. I know because I got it wrong for months.
Building is free now. The market for attention, trust, and someone’s willingness to try your thing? That hasn’t dropped a cent.
P.S. Want to connect? Send me a message on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.
PS: Ready to document before you schedule? I use ClickUp to keep decisions out of my calendar. Grab a free license here and see if it works for your workflow.