I Don't Bet on Products. I Bet on Attention.
Being good at coding isn't cool anymore.
I know that's going to piss some people off, but it's true. Anyone can spin up an app-store-ready app with Cursor and Claude Code in a day with no prior experience. The technical barrier that used to separate "real" founders from everyone else is basically gone.
So what separates the businesses that win from the ones that die? Distribution. Attention. The ability to get eyeballs on your thing and convert those eyeballs into money.
Most new businesses fail because they focus on product and ignore distribution. I see it constantly. Especially with technical founders.
The Pixar Lamp Problem
I spent some time in San Francisco recently, and I kept running into the same pattern.
There was this one company building a real-life Pixar lamp. You know, the little hopping lamp from the movie intros. Theirs had a camera, movement, and an AI that could talk to you. Cool product. Genuinely impressive engineering.
But I kept thinking: who actually wants a lamp that watches you eat dinner?
You just built Alexa, but as a lamp. These were incredibly smart people who could build really cool things, and this is what they chose to make. I looked at the actual business case and thought, what the fuck are you doing here?
To be fair, almost every successful company ends up somewhere completely different from where they started. So kudos for even starting. But at some point, you have to ask yourself if you're building something you can seriously scale, or if you're just building something because you can.
$5.3 Million and Six (6) Followers on TikTok.
Another company I visited was actually right up my alley. Bondu. They make AI plush toys.
I love the idea of AI toys. It's definitely going to be a big market. But you still need to execute it right.
I walked into their office and I could immediately feel it. A team of ten deeply technical software and hardware engineers, including the founder. All engineers. Even their "marketing guy" Raul originally applied for an engineering position, and they just made him do marketing instead. He doesn't know anything about marketing. Respectfully.
They raised $5.3 million in VC funding.
So why the fuck haven't they had a single viral video on TikTok or Instagram Reels yet? Those videos seriously convert. Why haven't they installed a mom-fluencer as the face of the company? Why haven't they launched on TikTok Shop? Or Amazon? Or literally anything?
They're playing the wrong game. They think it's about building the best product. It's not. It's partly about that, sure. But getting money in the door is what matters most, and it always will be.
The Death Spiral
Here's what happens when you focus only on product and ignore distribution.
You can always improve the product when you're making money. But if you stop doing marketing and only focus on product, the money stops coming in. And if no money is coming in, there's no reason to improve the product. Because no one is buying the fucking product.
This applies to basically every business. Ecommerce. Physical retail. Mobile apps. Software. SaaS. Whatever.
Get customers first. Let them complain. Pray for complaints. Pray for unhappy customers, and then go make them happy. That's how you build something real.
35 Sales Meetings, No Scalable Product
I'm a good example of this.
In the summer of 2025, a buddy of mine asked if I wanted to build an AI customer support tool for ecommerce stores. He would code it, I would sell it. I had never cold called before in my life.
I just picked up the phone and started dialing.
The result was around 35 to 40 sales meetings booked in the first month. And yes, I know what you're wondering. Did we have a product that actually worked?
Kind of. It worked locally. It worked for smaller loads. But it wouldn't have held up if we onboarded an ecommerce client with 5,000 customer email inquiries per month. Not yet.
So we asked Cursor to make us an interface that looked like it worked for our sales demos. We closed the customers. We signed the contracts. And then we told them something like: "We're at maximum capacity for onboarding new customers right now. Here's the contract. Please sign it and we'll start your onboarding in the next 14 to 21 days. We're sorry about the wait and truly appreciate your business."
Then we went and made the product work.
It wasn't really a lie, just kind of.
Stop Overcomplicating It
I don't bet on products. I bet on attention.
The stretchy monkey toy that built my company wasn't the "perfect" product. It was a good attention opportunity. The AI influencer I made wasn't revolutionary technology. It was a way to capture eyeballs and convert them into dollars.
The best product in the world doesn't matter if no one knows it exists. And a mediocre product with incredible distribution will beat a perfect product with no distribution every single time.
Stop perfecting. Start selling.