Why AI Made Selling Harder Than Building - The Techtonic

 

In the AI era, owning a social media channel has become an absolute necessity.

You no longer need to run around promoting your product in a hundred different places. From solopreneurs to massive corporations, everyone now owns their own social media channels to reach customers directly. That has simply become the daily norm.

About 20 years ago, Bill Gates said something interesting.

"It is ten times easier to teach an engineer how to sell than it is to teach a salesman engineering."

Back then, he was absolutely right. But with the dawn of the AI era, that statement is flipping completely upside down. We have entered an age where even someone with zero technical skills can effortlessly build a web or app service.

While building my own web service, I realized firsthand that creating a product has become easier than at any other point in human history.

The Solopreneur Virtuous Cycle

This is not just because AI does everything for you. It is also because there is an explosive abundance of solutions built specifically for solopreneurs.

In my case, I am currently using an authentication solution called Clerk. With this one tool, I can solve every single problem related to user authentication. Google login, Apple login, one click each. And I believe these kinds of out-of-the-box solutions will only keep multiplying.

Building is easy now. Getting noticed is the hard part

Why? The number of individual founders is exploding right now thanks to AI. As the solopreneur market grows, the market for tools built specifically for them grows alongside it. And because more specialized tools exist, even more people are encouraged to go solo.

Because of this virtuous cycle, building a product has never been easier. Building is no longer the bottleneck. The biggest problem now is marketing.

The Death of Product Differentiation

In the past, the product itself was your biggest differentiator. Now, I believe your marketing method will be your greatest edge.

Let's be honest. What you build and what I build are going to look very similar. Even if you are convinced that what you created is somehow special and unique, the moment you launch it, endless clones will appear. Your product will quickly become commonplace. Because of this, your biggest problem is no longer product differentiation. It is marketing.

That is why, from this moment on, we have to deeply study marketing and branding. Making a good product is not enough. You have to grab people's attention. You have to aggressively communicate whose problem you solve and what core mission drives what you do.

The world will not acknowledge your business simply because you built something good. Conversely, no matter how mediocre a product might be, if it is packaged in a premium, sophisticated way and heavily promoted on social media, people will gladly open their wallets.

In that regard, YouTube is one of the greatest tools ever created. Threads and Instagram operate on a very similar wavelength. Being active on social media is fundamentally about branding yourself.

The Mechanics of Selling and Clicking

This is exactly why you will find striking similarities between what the grandmasters of marketing say and what the grandmasters of YouTube say.

David Ogilvy, often called the father of advertising, said this about ads.

"In advertising, the headline is everything. It acts as a milestone that decides whether the reader will read the body copy or not. Five times as many people read the headline as the body text. If you write a good headline, you have already successfully spent 80% of your budget."

And that exact advice applies directly to YouTube thumbnails and titles. Paddy Galloway, who consults massive YouTubers like MrBeast, put it this way.

Master the click and the watch, and you win on YouTube and in business

"YouTube consists of two games. One is the game of clicking, and the other is the game of watching. Many people think it is over once they make a good video, but that means they only understand half of YouTube. First, make them click. Then, make them watch."

The mechanism of making people watch your video and the mechanism of making people buy your product operate on the exact same principle. And learning how to sell will become a massive, unfair advantage in the AI era. Because the making part keeps getting easier, those who know how to sell will naturally gain the upper hand.

The Rise of the Founder Influencer

When I published my online book, I quoted Balaji Srinivasan directly on my landing page. He described the future this way.

"Become a full-stack creator. The profitability of social media is only going to get higher. In the future, every new startup will have a founder influencer alongside a founder engineer."

To be completely honest, when I wrote that on the landing page, I did not think it applied to absolutely everyone. Now I firmly believe it does. Everyone needs to become an influencer.

Even massive corporations that everyone knows now advertise through influencers. That is how powerful influencers have become. But no matter who the influencer is, they will never be a 100% perfect match for the company's product. Why? Because the influencer did not build it.

The only way to find an influencer whose vibe matches your product completely is to become the influencer yourself. You build the product you genuinely believe the world needs, and you promote it yourself.

In an era where anyone can build a product, the ability to market it, market yourself, capture people's attention, and broadcast your value has become more critical than ever.

If you still do not have a social media channel to promote your personal brand, I strongly believe it is time to start.

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