Why Your AI App Has No Users (And 7 Ways to Fix It)
The market isn’t saturated. Here are 7 distribution strategies for AI builders
OpenAI ran its first-ever Super Bowl ad this year. The spot traced the history of human curiosity and building, from a child chasing a spiderweb to lines of early code on an aging computer, to a modern laptop running Codex. It closed on five words:
“You Can Just Build Things.”
It was not wrong. In fact, now you can.
More people than ever before are building apps, tools, products, and businesses on top of AI. The barrier to creating something that works is lower than it has ever been in the history of software.
Vibe coding, a term Andrej Karpathy coined in early 2025, has moved from developer circles to mainstream awareness. You describe what you want in plain language, an AI builds it, and you iterate from there.
The problem is that “you can just build things” has been enthusiastically taken up by a very large number of people, and most of what they have built is sitting in silence.
No users. No revenue. No traction. The silence that follows a launch has become so common it has its own rhythm: build, launch, nothing, add features, launch again, nothing.
This is not a story about AI making building impossible. It is a story about building never having been the hard part.
Is the Market Really Saturated?
Spend enough time on Twitter (now X), and you will encounter a recurring anxiety. With vibe coding making it trivially easy to ship an MVP, the argument goes, the market is being flooded with apps.
There are too many tools. Too many AI wrappers. Too many products solve the same vague problems with slightly different interfaces. Everything feels like it already exists, and the window to build anything meaningful has closed.
This fear is understandable. The number of products launched on platforms like Product Hunt has grown dramatically. Certain categories, simple AI writing tools, basic chatbots, generic productivity apps, genuinely are saturated in the sense that another entrant offers no meaningful differentiation.
But the conclusion that the whole market is saturated is wrong in a specific and important way.
Supply is exploding, yes. But demand is also exploding, just in a different way. Entire industries, such as healthcare, legal, construction, agriculture, and aged care, are only now starting to digitise seriously. The problems are enormous. The customers are real. The willingness to pay is there.
However, there’s a gap between supply and quality supply, and between products that exist and products that people can actually find.
What AI Actually Exposed
Here is the thing that vibe coding has made brutally obvious, even though it has always been true.
Building was never the hard part.
The hard parts have always been the same:
Understanding people. Not users in the abstract. Specific humans, with specific workflows, specific frustrations, and specific things they’d actually hand over their credit card to fix.
Getting distribution. You can build the best product in the world and go completely broke if nobody finds it. Audience, partnerships, SEO, sales skills, virality. These are the skills that move the needle.
Building moats AI can’t copy in a weekend. Proprietary data. Brand trust. A community that relies on you. Regulatory expertise. A personal network built over years. These are the things that compound and can’t be vibe-coded into existence.
The founders who win right now aren’t the best prompters. They’re the ones who deeply understand a specific group of people and have figured out how to reach them.
We’ve Seen This Panic Before
This exact feeling, the dread that everything is saturated and the opportunity is gone, is not new.
It hit when WordPress and cheap hosting made everyone a blogger between 2005 and 2010. Everyone said blogging was over. The people who kept publishing with genuine insight and built real audiences ended up fine.
It hit when the App Store and early no-code tools made everyone a mobile developer between 2009 and 2013. Everyone said the App Store was too crowded. The people who solved real problems for specific audiences built serious businesses.
It hit when no-code tools and Stripe made everyone a SaaS founder between 2018 and 2022. Everyone said SaaS was dead. The people who found genuine niches and learned to sell made money.
Each time, the “it’s saturated” crowd sat on the sidelines. Each time, the people who kept building with taste, obsession, and a distribution strategy ended up rich, or at least fine.
This time is structurally the same. The only thing that’s changed is the speed.
Distribution is the New Moat
Greg Isenberg, founder of Late Checkout and one of the sharper voices in the builder community, put it bluntly in his YouTube video “Stop Vibe Coding. Start Getting Customers.”
Code is now commoditised. Distribution is the new bottleneck.
He lays out seven concrete strategies for vibe coders and builders who want to actually reach customers. Here’s a summary.
1. Use an MCP server as your sales team. Build a server that answers the questions your product solves, then publish it to MCP registries. Every AI assistant that connects to it becomes a 24/7 sales rep for you. (Note: this one’s technical, and not relevant for every product.)
2. Programmatic SEO. Generate 10,000 pages in a weekend using a keyword pattern, a dataset you scrape with something like Firecrawl, and a page template. Think “AI interpreter for meetings” and “real-time interpreter in Sydney.” Just make sure a human reviews the content, otherwise it turns into slop fast.
3. A free tool as your top of funnel. Build a grader, analyser, or calculator that gives users instant, shareable value. Their score becomes social proof. Their shares become backlinks. You capture their email. Then you upsell.
4. Answer engine optimisation. Get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. Write clear, structured, direct answers to the top 20 questions your customers ask. Add FAQ schema markup. Monitor your citations using a tool like otterly.ai.
5. The viral artefact. Make your product’s output shareable. Spotify’s Wrapped. GitHub’s contribution graph. Duolingo’s streak count. What does your user want to brag about? Build a beautiful, shareable card and add a pre-filled share button. Your users become your marketing team.
6. Buy the audience. Building an audience from zero takes years and isn’t guaranteed. Instead, acquire a niche newsletter. Go to Duuce.com or Newsletter Investor, find newsletters with 5k to 50k subscribers in your target niche, and DM the owner. Many are making next to nothing and will sell for $5k to $20k.
7. One pillar, seven channels. Record 30 minutes of content once a week. Transcribe it. Drop the transcript into Claude and turn it into tweet threads, LinkedIn posts, short videos, a newsletter, a blog post, and quote graphics. Schedule across platforms. The key: set up your prompts carefully so the output doesn’t sound like AI slop.
The core insight running through all seven: most vibe coders are building in distribution-first order. They build first, then hope people find them. Smart builders flip it. They grow an audience first, ask that audience what they need, build it in a weekend, then launch to people who are already waiting.
What This Means for You
The opportunity in 2026 is not about who can build the fastest. That race is over and AI won.
The opportunity is about who understands a specific group of humans deeply enough to build something they actually want. And who has the channels to reach them.
If you can do those two things, the collapsing barrier to building is not a threat. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you. You can now test ideas in days that used to take months. You can serve niches that were too small to justify the engineering cost. You can build, learn, and iterate faster than any previous generation of founders.
The market isn’t saturated. It’s just that most of the new supply is solving the wrong problems for people they’ve never actually talked to.
Talk to people first. Build distribution. Then build the thing.
That order has always mattered. It just matters more now.
Greg Isenberg’s distribution framework is presented in his YouTube video “Stop Vibe Coding. Start Getting Customers,” The ideas in that section are his, and the original video is worth watching in full. OpenAI’s Super Bowl LX ad, “You Can Just Build Things,” aired in February 2026 and was produced by Doomsday Entertainment.