The MVP is the easy part now

The build logs on this site document each one, commit by commit. The honest summary: the technology was the quick bit every single time. Auth, payments, search, admin, analytics — solved patterns, assembled fast, made faster by agents. The hard parts were different in every case, and they were never the code: Moo-ving’s hard part is convincing sellers to trust a new marketplace. Vetted’s is reaching interim workers in the port. Toogi’s is her audience, which she built herself, post by post. 8tot8’s is becoming the place Antwerp parents check by habit.

Five products, one lesson: building is a week. Distribution is the year.

A leaked Google memo said it plainly back in 2023: "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI." The barrier to entry for capable software had dropped, in the memo’s words, from the output of a major research organisation to one person and an evening. That was about AI models. It now describes app development generally. Any feature you ship, a competitor can rebuild in weeks — and an agent-assisted competitor in days.

What this means for founders is uncomfortable and clarifying: a differentiator has to live somewhere copying is slow. Trust built over years. A dataset a rival lacks. Relationships. A brand people already believe. A workflow embedded so deep that leaving hurts. The feature list is the least defensible thing about a product.

The market data backs this up. Global app downloads fell again in 2025 — down 2.7% to 106.9 billion, the fifth straight year of decline from the 2020 peak. Consumer spending went the other way: up 21.6% to $155.8 billion, driven by subscriptions. People are installing fewer apps and paying more for the ones they keep.

Read that as a user behaviour statement: attention has consolidated. The average person has settled into their set of apps, and the price of joining that set keeps rising. A new product wins a place at the table through an audience that already trusts the maker, a network that makes the product better with each user, or a channel the maker owns. Cold app-store launches are a lottery with worsening odds.

Investors now say it out loud: distribution is the moat, and it is the one thing AI keeps making more valuable rather than cheaper. Code gets cheaper every quarter. An audience that trusts you compounds.

My own analytics make the argument better than any citation. As I write this, Walk with Toogi has drawn over a thousand visitors in the past thirty days — while Moo-ving and 8tot8, technically richer products from the same builder on the same stack, drew a few dozen each. The difference is Toogi’s audience, built post by post before the software existed. Traffic follows the person; the product converts the trust.

That order of operations is the modern playbook: audience first, product second, and the product’s job is to serve the people already listening.

I said the same thing in public back in June, before writing this piece — audience beats build quality, even when the build is mine:

It is also why this writing section exists, and why these pieces travel to LinkedIn. I am applying the same advice I give: own the words, publish where the audience lives, and let the site be the home the audience can always find.