We've seen multiple ideas/products get quickly absorbed into frontier models, OSS, or well-funded startups. The cycle from "interesting idea" to "commoditized feature" is getting very short. Personally, there were three of these in the last year.

And even if your product is genuinely great, distribution is becoming the real bottleneck. Discovery via prompting or search is limited, and paid acquisition is increasingly expensive.

One alternative is to loop between build and kill, letting usage emerge organically rather than trying to force distribution.