Strategy for Scarcity
Creation used to be the bottleneck. Now adoption is.
For most of business history, the hard part was making the thing. Factories, printing presses, broadcast towers and ad budgets were the moat, and whoever could fund production and distribution at scale won. AI collapsed that. Building a credible product is now cheap, fast and available to everyone — which means it has stopped being an advantage.
What used to be scarce
Creation capacity. High barriers to build product and content, centralized channels to reach people, and a linear funnel to move them through. Advantage came from capital scale and owning the pipe.
What is scarce now
Attention, trust, realized value and retention. None of them can be bought outright, and none is won at launch. They are earned after the product is in someone’s hands — and retention now means being embedded in daily operations, not merely remembered. That makes the product itself the distribution channel.
The moat is the loop, not the wall
Four vectors compound into earned preference: a network that carries discovery, trust that accrues from being the default workflow, value that lands fast enough to be felt, and propagation that turns usage into the channel.
Cheap to launch. Expensive to achieve widespread adoption. That is the whole shift, and it is why we work the way we do: build, learn, adjust, with your team, until all four vectors hold — rather than handing over a deck.