There have been a few AI releases that had such insane demand that their servers couldn’t handle it.
Apparently Anthropic’s releases this week did that.
Something my guy used to teach me all the time. Is that people pay for access.
He used it a lot to frame time and value of high level/profile people… but it also applies to convenience.
Why do so many people pay those marked up prices for DoorDash and Instacart and for convenience stores when a grocery store is probably half the price?
The thing to understand is what is convenient to the typical AI community is still way too complicated for the average user.
Claude code isn’t simple enough. Claude artifacts are not simple enough.
There are people who are tech adverse… but who still want to be able to get an edge.
There’s going to be a massive amount of middle ground for quite a while. You can be building for those people.
Meet them where they are at.
And remember that they are not you. This is a trap. I fall into all the time, even though I know it.
If you want to compete in a smaller market… big fish in the little pond…
Figure out how AI can create very customized applications.
I was talking to a client last week to show her what I’ve been building but instead of building something for business I built a flashcards set that could teach Mandarin to her four-year-old.
And then I told her how she could use the system to teach her daughter how to build her own applications with her mom.
By the way, anti-gravity did an amazingly beautiful job at that… and it was done 15 minutes later while we were just having a conversation.
None of us know what the demand is or who’s going to be able to fulfill it.
I’ve been in business online for almost 24 years and every time I think I missed the boat…
The reality was…
Most people didn’t even know if there was a boat to begin with much less boarded it.
I was so far ahead of people and couldn’t see them that I thought I was behind them.
If you’re here, I promise you, you’re ahead of almost everyone you know.
In many ways, the world is incredibly small.
Like my American dad who went to school in Taiwan and 30 years later, ran into a schoolmates in Seattle Washington.
But in other ways, the world is so much bigger than you can imagine… and the reality is you don’t need the whole market to live a very, very good life.
Just food for thought.