Execution is cheap, ideas are expensive. We are living in the opposite of the dotcom bubble.
With powerful agents that can now cover a plethora of tasks readily available to founders, teams and quite literally, anybody within the company structure, deployment and technical backend work has grown increasingly cheaper.
What this means is that products will become increasingly similar. This isn't a revolutionary observation, just one that is occurring across crypto and AI at this time. The immediate post COVID product suite once faced a similar dilemma. There was a wave of team meeting apps that emerged. Yet, 2 remain. Are you a Meets or a Zoom type of meeting host?
All of this is to say, marketing and branding will be a tech company's defining trait as titans of the space continue to innovate at an alarming rate.
We're seeing this unfold on X with Anthropic and Google. Each week, an idea which a startup completed a Series B funding for, is eradicated by a simple /command on either of the agents.
The latest in this as of time of writing, is site administrative and research tasks. Claude Cowork allows for autonomous document sorting and research - Typical tasks formally executed by PAs, internal research teams or marketing executives.
It is a dog eat dog building environment.
So what can hopeful, emerging companies do? Build brands that can sustain external pressures.
The general accepted constraints economists use to explain a consumer's 'loyalty' to a service are informational constraints, search or switching cost. These barriers are the most logical arguments to justify why a consumer fails to switch service provider - For article's sake, let's assume this is a customer using ChatGPT to process their company's marketing spend rather than a dedicated analysis model.
Yet these barriers are becoming far less apparent in a landscape dominated by social media, agents having cheap, readily available information and little-to-none switching costs.
The truth VCs must now grapple, is that the next unicorn to rear its head in a tech bull market may not be built by engineers.
It will be built by founders who understand that, in a commodity market, perception is product. Technicals alone will not suffice. Those who recognize this shift early will inherit the market.
Those who don't will suffer the same fate as pets.com, webvan.com and a graveyard of others. No matter if more lines were done by hand than a late 80s party, or a team of agents took the helm, product is no longer the singular trait.
Brand is the last frontier once distinct product differences no longer suffice.