AI has eliminated the engineering barrier that kept marketers out of software. Direct-response marketers can now ship products in a weekend, using skills they've honed for decades in capturing attention. The engineering advantage is gone. Marketing skills like hooks and positioning are now the primary edge.
The indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. So those that don't know, an indie hacker is someone that might have been like a solo developer back in the day, right? Like Levels is actually a good example of like indie hacker. He's built a lot of stuff and he's kind of marketed on his own type of deal. But he's saying that the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. And I think this is interesting for you and I both to react to this, Neil, because we've kind of straddled the line between both, I would say. So when I came up, direct response marketers sold ebooks and courses. Not because we loved it, but because it was the only thing that you could build without engineers. Okay? We all wanted to be in software. That's where the leverage was. The wall was never talent. It was operational. So hire engineers, manage engineers, retain engineers, and become a real company. The best marketers of my generation stayed put. The wall is now gone. Now a guy who spent 20 years learning how to make strangers care can ship a product in a weekend. You cannot compete with that person on offers, on hooks, on positioning. AI does not hand those to you in a tab. The engineering advantage evaporated. The marketing advantage didn't. For 20 years, marketers wanted what engineers had. Now they have it. Okay, I have a lot to say about this, but you can go first if you want to.
Yeah, dude, I agree with you. Marketers now have the ability to do many more things because of AI.
