Michael Tsai, a few days after my reverse centaur post:
I don’t mind at all receiving a generic press release or even a one-liner with a link. But these lengthy e-mails, customized for me, purport to be personal communications when they really aren’t. Sometimes I’ll reply with questions or feedback, and it feels like the entire conversation is with an AI.
So that kills cold email as a marketing channel. I’m not a marketing guy. The last time I cold-emailed someone, it took me a few hours to draft the email, a shower to rethink the email, then I edited the email to make sure I sounded friendly without pretending to be too friendly. People bothered to look at your work because they could see the effort you bothered to put in. And now anyone can fake bothering with their AI.
And the shit thing is, I don’t think any channel is immune. Product Hunt died first. Then the subreddit self-promo threads. Then Show HN. Then those Discord showcase channels. They’re just as flooded as Tsai’s inbox. Same thing about launching apps in an app store.
It used to be that when you start from nothing you have to make noise in those channels. A long time ago, launching an app was enough to get you noticed. Now you are making noise in a pasar. It is really hard to “ship something people use” when people don’t use your something because they never noticed it in the first place.
On the old internet, nobody knew you were a dog. If you could write well or code well, you could build an audience. Now you can’t, so people are pivoting to being influencers. Now everyone knows you’re a dog because you have to let people see you.
At this point the marketing gurus will say: just niche down. But the niches are too small to make a living from. And like I said, I don’t think any channel is immune. Try launching your 4th subscription service to your 800 followers on Bluesky. At some point, you can’t squeeze any more water out of the rock.
Which makes me think of xkcd #1420. Before 1975, not enough people were buying software. After 2025, there’s so much software that software is worthless. In the middle there’s a brief, glorious period in which indie software development was a real job.