What is a product?

The problem is that getting your first user or first $1 is not particularly easier with even the best LLMs to help you. Distribution is brutal — Google doesn’t want to index new sites, Twitter doesn’t want to distribute lowbie posts, right here HN’s /new queue is mercurial ..

So building is faster, but marketing—not so much

It’s a great question, but I don’t think the article answers it.

Not in any academic sense, but in a real-world sense a software product is something that as a user you can rely on to solve a problem. Rely is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.

You can rely on a vendor’s product if (a) they’re going to be around for a long time, otherwise the investment into adopting it isn’t worth it; (b) the vendor is committed to solving your problem in an ongoing way - meaning they understand enough of the domain (ideally more than you do) that they’re going to be a partner even as your own needs evolve; (c) they deliver the product in a dependable way - high uptime and security.

So it comes down to “can you depend on this software over time?”

I don't disagree but for some of the examples given (YouTube, Instagram, X.com) a huge entry barrier is the network effect. Even if AI could perfectly clone these products in a day, that still doesn't translate to instant market share.

>A real product has real users, a real market and solves real problems.

This misses the mark.

A product is something which can be exchanged with others, transferred into their agency, for them to own and use according to their free will.

They don't have to use it or indeed 'be a user' - it is up to them whether or not utility is derived. The only requirement is that it is exchangeable and that agency has been transferred in such a manner that all parties involved in the exchange are satisfied with the transfer of agency.

A project is some activity which has an expectation of changing state over time.

Project management means projecting the scope and sphere of that activity into the future, in order to change its state in such a way, hopefully, that something exchangeable is produced. Product management means, making sure a satisfactory exchange occurs between the creator of a product and its new owner.

So many people get this wrong.

It is not a product if it's a project. It is only a product once it has been exchanged with another entity for their purposes.

You can have many, many projects which will never become products, because they won't be exchanged with others. You can have products which are valued by their owner in ways unintended by their creators. The value and utility is arbitrary to whether or not something is a product - the only requirement for something to become a product is that it is exchanged.

Successful product(S) are exchanged at scale. A single product can be very successful if the scale of that exchange is high. A lot of products can be very successful if the number of exchanges is great.

Until the exchange occurs, it's not a product. It's a resource. Inventory.

Side projects become products only once they are exchanged.

There really are plenty of Google analogs. There are plenty of chatbot analogs. Any one of us can recreate Instagram or X. These competitive analogs simply have not become products, because they have not been exchanged. Products which harness human collectivity have the problem of not being exchanged at scale until the collective decides to participate in the exchange, i.e. recommend their friends sign up to join them.

The problem with easily started new side projects is that they are not so easily exchanged at sufficient scale.

This just reads like someone's cross at the AI hype and wanted to take a shot, but missed.

The underlying point --that network effects exist and determine the success of a product-- has always been the case, long before AI made it possible to vibe code a rough Instagram clone in a weekend.

Anyway, if you want a successful new product, the path to success (obviously) isn't likely to be copying an existing behemoth, but offering something new, unique and valuable. That's always been the (exceptionally difficult) challenge, and AI doesn't help with this. But I think we can be confident that in the future, as humans do create new, unique, and valuable products, some of them will probably be vibe coded.

I think it ultimately just comes down to laziness. People are increasingly loathe to make multi-year plans and stick to them, for various reasons.

Building something like a YouTube competitor is theoretically doable by a small team. It’s vastly more possible with AI tools than it was a decade ago.

But the “muscle” of doing difficult things has atrophied for many people, in large part because the AI tools themselves reduce your ability to actually do the work. If day after day, you just prompt an AI to make things for you, do research for you, etc. then you gradually stop working that muscle yourself.

It makes me think that the ideal usage of AI tools might be a deliberately limited one: do everything on your own, but check in with the AI once a week for review.

Since everyone has access to the same tools, what exactly has changed about building a new business? Are people really expecting brand new companies to just displace the existing ones? What separates one company from another looks the same as always to me risk tolerance, etc. Now with the added benefit of a lot more competitors, plenty of who can't actually execute, all making noise in the market.

If the things created with AI lack originality, they are nothing more than clones, rather than prototypes. While I agree with the majority of the text, I really don't understand why the amateurish efforts of so many are taken so seriously, to the point where people actually obsess over them. The marketing of these outputs by individuals or organizations with no prior connection to the industry (especially on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, HackerNews, etc.) is driven solely by self-interest. These ideas only excite the laypeople and the naive. For a professional or anyone who actually knows how things work, these are—as the name implies—just tools for now, not the be-all and end-all.

But is the definition of the product really just something that has loads of users. If so than the best "product engineers" are just people with gigantic following since every url they share would get traction.

Imo a better distinguisher of demos and products is: "is your thing CAPABLE of solving a real problem" (even if it isn't doing so at a scale atm). Google+ was a product (not a super successfull one), eventhough it didn't have many users. Conversely, a viral interactive gimmick can attract millions of users in a day without really being a product at all.

A product is something consumable.

Does a product include the ability to acquire and retain customers?

"A miserable little pile of secrets."