AI and Business: Never Easier to Start, Never Harder to Sustain

The Growth Insight 🌱

AI and Business: Never Easier to Start, Never Harder to Sustain

Building a million-dollar business today is easier than ever. Building a lasting one has never been harder. Cal AI went viral, raking in millions within weeks.

But in two months, there'll be a hundred similar apps in the store. They'll charge less, compete fiercely, and Cal's equity value will likely plummet. This isn't an isolated phenomenon—it's the new reality of AI business.

You can now Vibe code a beautiful clone of any app in minutes. You can automate entire workflows with a few prompts. You can build what once required teams of engineers with barely any technical knowledge.

But so can everyone else. "If you want to build an AI business, you need either a data advantage or a network effect advantage," says a prominent investor. Everything else becomes a race to the bottom.

Consider the pressure washing business with an outdated website. Five years ago, redesigning it meant hiring a designer, waiting weeks, and paying thousands. Today, tools like Vercel can transform it in seconds.

This creates fascinating opportunities for short-term wins—building the Bank of Vibe Coding to fund entrepreneurs, message analysis tools to identify toxic relationships, or AI lending platforms that approve loans in hours instead of months. But the sustainability question looms large.

The most promising path? Building audience-first businesses. Distribution has become the ultimate moat. Media companies with loyal followings can later add AI tools to provide value and capture data. This creates defensible advantages that aren't easily cloned.

Secure AI products represent another opportunity. Just as people pay premium for password managers they trust, they'll pay for AI solutions that guarantee their data remains private and secure.

The middle ground is disappearing. AI businesses will either be quick one-off wins that make you a millionaire before competitors catch up, or carefully constructed moats around data, distribution, and trust that can sustain value for years.

The landscape has shifted dramatically. It's never been easier to start, and never been more important to think strategically about how you'll sustain.