This is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users.

Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.

Maybe I just wasn't good at it.

That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.

Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.

Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.

Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.