Artificial Intelligence has turned software into a commodity. It used to take a dedicated engineering team months to build a tech product. Now it takes a single person a weekend, sometimes a few hours.

The barrier to creating a product has collapsed. And so has the sense of exclusivity that used to come with having one.

As Sam Altam, the creator of ChatGPT teases, we are entering a “fast fashion” era of SaaS (Software as a Service). New products flood the market every day. Many of them chasing the same problems with similar features and interfaces. They are like tomatoes in your busy local market—abundant, indistinguishable, and priced to move.

For African entrepreneurs, the challenge is even sharper. Most of our products are built on top of infrastructure created in Silicon Valley, which means the underlying capabilities are rarely unique. We are not only competing with our neighbours or even our continent. We are competing in a global market where the same tools, APIs, and frameworks are available to everyone.

When the product itself loses exclusive value, people don’t choose based on features. They choose based on familiarity, trust, and narrative. They buy from someone whose name they’ve seen enough times to feel comfortable with, whose story resonates, or whose personality has already earned them attention. In other words, they buy from people, not just from products.

If you are busy “vibe coding”, shipping out build after build with no public profile or presence, you are essentially shooting blanks. You may have a product, but you have no line of sight to the target. In a saturated market, the best product does not win by default. The product that is seen, remembered, and trusted wins. And that is marketing’s domain.

Why marketing has become the moat

For a long time, marketing was treated as the afterthought. Something to deal with once the product was ready. The scarcity and difficulty of building meant that the product itself was the proof of value. But now that building is cheap, the proof of value has to be earned elsewhere. That means building your own name online, showing up in the communities your customers trust, collaborating with other creators and personal brands, and developing distribution channels that are not at the mercy of someone else’s algorithm.

Most importantly, it means deliberately increasing your product’s perceived value, because its functional value has already been commoditized.

This cannot be done by pressing an automation button. Tools can help you scale what already exists. But they cannot replace the slow and deliberate process of earning trust, telling a story, and being present enough for the market to know you exist.

In the “fast fashion” era of SaaS, speed is no longer scarce. What is scarce is attention, trust, and differentiation. AI has commoditized products. The only thing left to de-commoditize is you.

——————–

If you have a tech product, contact us so we can plot your grand market entry (or re-entry)