IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI implementation requires is clearly exponential to complexity of the organization.
You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of building a business imaginable.
And almost everyone larger than you is finding it harder to achieve similar productivity gains from implementing AI, if not outright struggling with it. This is a golden moment and won't last long.
I already get multiple cold emails a month selling me some sort of software product or service that I don't need and that wouldn't work for me.
If a bunch of additional people start going and building MVPs, what keeps that from becoming even more of a flood, like what you get if you post a job application on LinkedIn nowdays?
I think sales is likely to get harder, not easier, soon.
And to your earlier post, I think the big question is: can individuals get more done on their own now building new things because of less organizational issues compared to incumbents, or because of less product complexity and scope? Is the organization the problem, or is the complexity of stuff built to try to service a thousand different previous sales deals and customers?
Productivity has always been inversely exponentially correlated with manpower, I don't think this is related to AI, and I don't think AI speeds anything up in this scenario. If nothing else you're now constraining what could be one-man development speed to the speed of a chat-session, which is much, much slower.
If you know what you're doing (and most times even if you don't, yet) it's much faster to work actually solo, without bothering with any AI assistance except at most something like one-line auto-complete on command.
I can't agree with this more, and it's exactly both the position and the impetus of my personal action plan for the next several years to come.
Truly, AI levels the playing field, if you just have the inclination to look at it that way. It brings such potential to the right people. In my hands, a software developer who has been slinging code for food for 40+ years, I am a 'god' with a cheap monthly subscription to Claude Code. I can run several projects and keep track of every one of them and see progress like I've never had that chance to, in my entire lifetime. And yes, I still wield the stick, because I KNOW how to do this stuff. Claude really doesn't. Claude just gives me raw material, individual orchestral parts as it were, that I can put together with a conductor's baton.
My enterprise client? They get barebones slop. Enough to keep things alive but yet never be scalable and extendable. And they deserve that. They slaughtered our entire US based team and went overseas. They retain me to keep the wheels on while offshore wires up worthless, unpredictable AI agents to 'enhance' the product. I'm taking their money until I can break free sometime next year. They get the scraps now, and they will never know until karma brings them their bitter fruit.
My personal project. A really, really fun and fluid development momentum. Truly art and logic combined with Claude doing the grunt work for me. Absolutely a blast and it will have a user base, and the user base will really enjoy the results.
New partnerships. You can now make ANYONE you know, that much more viable, that much more tech savvy. As an individual, with your talents and our new little 'digital helpers', you, yourself can become the David to any Goliath you wish. You can help elevate ideas, small teams, and aspiring entrepreneurs and have a blast doing so.
Shed the notion that this moment has to be dark for you. It doesn't. It just takes seeing that maybe, just maybe, the boneheads that are trying to capitalize in these horrendous actions which include lying about AI, lying about the reasons they are laying off, etc. are bringing about their very demise in real time. Clueless as to what they are doing.
And those of us with the knowledge, ethics, high standards, discipline, and honor, are now armed with the very thing that can bring down those who created it to harm us.
