Your shortcut is everyone else's shortcut

If a tool lets you do a month's marketing in an afternoon, what are you going to do with the rest of the month?

Because your competitors can buy it too.

We keep measuring how much easier the work gets. Build the app faster. Make the video cheaper. Publish more. Those are useful improvements, but they don't answer the question that determines whether you have a business: why would someone choose you?

Vasco Aires made the point with a billboard. One billboard gets attention. Put a hundred around it and each has to fight harder to be noticed.¹ Cheaper billboards make it cheaper to join that crowd.

I want the tools, and I want an advantage that survives everyone else getting them.

Go where people still hesitate

Alex M H Smith, a business strategist, argues that when marketing gets easy to copy, you should look at work competitors resist: original research, live appearances, the tedious and expensive stuff.² I think that's a much more useful direction than trying to outproduce everyone.

Friction can keep something valuable scarce. Getting ten busy founders to trust you enough to spend an evening together takes work. Generating ten invitations doesn't. AI can help with the invitations, but the room is still empty until people agree to come.

Who belongs there? Who would make someone else want to attend? Who needs to be left out, even if they're willing to pay? Those decisions shape whether you're creating another networking event or a room people rearrange their schedules to get into.

Sam Parr and Joe Speiser launched Hampton, a community for founders, publicly in 2023. Members applied, were interviewed and vetted, then joined roughly ten-person groups matched by business size. Those groups met monthly with a facilitator. They deliberately kept the business quiet while choosing the members and putting the groups together.³

The software for a community is easy to get. The people, their willingness to talk openly, and the judgment required to put them together are much harder to reproduce. You could copy Hampton's website and still have none of what someone was joining for.

That's the work I'd protect while using AI to cut the administration around it. Interviewing applicants looks inefficient if your goal is more signups. If the people in the room are the product, that work helps protect the reason anyone signs up at all.

Hard for you, useful for them

When we were growing Sumo at AppSumo, we noticed how many of our users had WordPress sites. We went looking for popular plugins whose owners might have moved on and offered to buy them. Some cost less than a few thousand dollars. We could estimate the reach we'd get by introducing Sumo inside the plugins' dashboards.

Finding the owners, reaching an agreement and taking responsibility for their plugins involved work. It gave us a way to reach people already using those plugins, an opportunity other people hadn't bothered to pursue.

I'd apply the same thinking to what AI makes easy now. Use it to find candidates and prepare the research. Then spend the time it saves getting the owner on the phone and working out a deal. A competitor can use the same tools to build a similar list. They still have to persuade an owner to make a deal.

The useful friction is on your side. You do the work so the customer gets something they couldn't easily get elsewhere. Making customers fight through a bad signup form doesn't make your product more valuable. Neither does spending weeks on a video they have no reason to watch.

I'd judge the work by what it gives us: access to the right people, evidence a buyer needs, or a service they can trust us to deliver. If I can't answer that, being harder isn't a selling point.

Spend the time you got back

If AI saves a day of writing and editing, I wouldn't automatically fill that day with more writing and editing. I'd look at what we've been putting off because it means asking someone else for their time or trust.

Maybe it's visiting a customer and seeing why their team still won't use the product. Maybe it's bringing together a handful of buyers who could help each other, and doing the personal work to get them there.

I'd choose one and put the saved day toward it. Before starting, I'd be specific about what should exist afterward that we don't have today: a customer willing to show their results, a partner willing to introduce us, a group that wants to meet again.

And I'd keep asking whether a competitor could get the same thing by buying the same tool.

Use AI aggressively. I want those hours back so we can do something other people keep avoiding.