Distribution is the New Engineering

For the past two decades, if you wanted to build a technology company, you needed engineers. Great ones. Lots of them. Expensive ones.

Engineering was the moat. It was the reason Google could do what Google does. The reason startups raised millions before shipping a single line of code. The reason "we need to hire more engineers" was the answer to almost every problem.

That era is ending.

The Cost of Building is Approaching Zero

AI is doing to engineering what the internet did to publishing. It's not that engineers are gone, it's that the cost of creating software is collapsing so fast that it's becoming a rounding error.

A solo founder today can ship in a weekend what used to take a team of ten engineers six months. That number is going to keep shrinking. Soon, describing what you want to build will be enough to build it. The gap between idea and product is closing.

This is a massive shift. And most people are thinking about it wrong.

They're asking: "Will AI replace engineers?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: if anyone can build anything, what actually matters?

The New Bottleneck

When supply of something becomes infinite, it stops being the constraint. Water is everywhere — you don't compete on access to water. You compete on what you do with it.

Software is becoming water.

The new bottleneck isn't building. It's reaching people. It's trust. It's attention. It's distribution.

Think about it: if you and I both have access to the same AI tools, and we can both ship the same product in a weekend, the only thing that separates us is who's listening when we launch.

MrBeast vs. Google's Engineering Org

Here's a thought experiment that would have sounded insane five years ago.

Imagine you're launching a new consumer app. You have two options: you can have MrBeast promote it to his 350 million subscribers, or you can have all of Google's engineering team build it for you.

Take the engineers. You still need to acquire users. You still need to break through the noise. You still need distribution.

Take MrBeast. You launch to an audience that trusts him completely, watches everything he puts out, and will download whatever he tells them to download. Your app hits the App Store charts on day one.

The engineers build a better product. MrBeast builds a bigger business.

This isn't theoretical. We've seen it play out. Influencer-backed startups routinely outperform technically superior products because they launch with distribution baked in. Prime energy drink didn't win because of superior hydration technology. It won because KSI and Logan Paul had a billion eyeballs.

Distribution was always important. The insight isn't new. What's changed is the ratio.

When engineering was expensive, a 10x engineering team was a real competitive advantage that could last years. Distribution advantages mattered, but a brilliant engineering team could eventually catch up or out-innovate.

Now? A 10x engineering team ships in a week instead of two weeks. That advantage is almost irrelevant. But a 10x distribution advantage, a creator with a loyal following, a community you've built over years, a brand people trust — that compounds, and it's much harder to replicate.

You can't just hire your way to distribution. You can't just throw money at it. You can't build it in a weekend.

What This Means if You're Building Something

The playbook is changing. The best founders of the next decade won't just be great at building- they'll be great at building an audience before they build the product.

Start with distribution. Build the community, the newsletter, the following, the trust. Then figure out what to build for them.

Your first hire shouldn't always be an engineer. It might be a content creator.

Your most important infrastructure isn't your tech stack. It might be your email list.

The question isn't "can we build this?" anymore. The question is "can we reach the people who would want this?"

We're entering a world where the best engineers and the best products don't automatically win. Where a teenager with a camera and a genuine connection to their audience has more leverage than a team of Stanford PhDs with the best tooling money can buy.

That's uncomfortable if you've spent years mastering engineering. It's exciting if you've been grinding away building an audience and wondering why it wasn't translating into something bigger.

Distribution is the new engineering. The moat has moved. The question is: are you building in the right place?