He's not. That's how things will be from now on. Because there's plenty of hacks who think prompting will make them millions if they could just find that one idea, yet aren't willing to do the work to find, vet, build, and iterate.
It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you.
There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper?
We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.
I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.
With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.
A conundrum I see is that once someone releases a “solution” to a problem, it becomes much easier for someone else to come up with prompts to have AI make a clone of that solution.
Basically, the moat for many products is disappearing, and it would be relatively cheap for someone to make a clone that undercuts the cost of the first to market. The original product is charging $2? Cool, the clone will cost $1 - maybe it’s not as good due to less QA, but consumers will see the lower price and buy it.
> I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.
I'm afraid your hundreds of hours of prompting will reduce to "clone this product, here are 200 screenshots of every screen."
I don't understand why people aren't getting this: there is no skill in prompting! The CC leak literally showed Anthropic engineers developing Claude with broken half-english prompts like "gud, now make better".
Hundreds of hours doing what? If you're not reviewing the code, then what are you doing, just planning features? Because that would be trivial to copy in a fraction of the time by just feeding screenshots of your app to one's AI of choice.
That's the thing. The moment you publish, the design you spent 100s of hours on also becomes public, at which point it becomes entirely replicable with little to no recourse. Hence the theme of this entire thread: a devaluement spiral.
Despair is a choice some people have made, and they want to drag others into it to justify their inaction. Take your best shot. Maybe it takes off, maybe it doesn't.
Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than being a replyguy.
Call me suspicious.