AI gave me the superpower to finally build anything, turns out building was never the hard part. How does everyone cope?
I've been a developer for 10+ years. Self taught, always freelancing, never worked as a dev inside a company. So I never really felt like a "real" developer, I just got things done but was never part of big projects.
Whenever I tried building my own products I hit the same wall. Either it existed already or it was too hard to build alone. So my stuff either stayed unfinished or went nowhere.
Now with AI I can basically build anything. In the last months I shipped a Saas for compliance in the construction industry, an internal staff organization system for construction (I use both daily at my full time job), and a Google Ads MCP that automates the ad campaigns for the compliance SaaS. Right now I'm building a DJ application, I was a product manager for DJ products a decade ago so that one is a bit of a passion project.
What I realized: building was never the hard part. Marketing is.
Small niches like construction are brutal. Ads cost a fortune because Google thinks they're badly targeted, and nobody is actively searching for these products because they basically didn't exist before. No search volume to capture.
The Ads MCP got some traction, 100 GitHub stars in 2 weeks, but then I saw others getting 5k stars in 2 days. And most of my stars came from posting on Reddit, where mods love closing anything that looks like self promotion.
So how is everyone dealing with this? We all got the same superpowers at the same time, which means competition got way harder overnight. Building is cheap now. How do you actually get users?