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Countertrends

It’s getting easier and easier to create products (thanks to Vibe Coding, and Claude Code in particular). But selling and advertising them is getting harder and harder.

First, the number of people with money in the world isn’t growing (in Russia, it’s actually shrinking).

Second, the level of trust between people has dropped significantly recently. Do you remember how, just a few years ago, we used to answer calls from unknown numbers? Do you remember how we communicated on WhatsApp last year? Do you remember how we used to trust what was written in newspapers and shown on TV? It’s hard to imagine that now.

What does this mean? The role of trust, the cost of contact, and the customer acquisition cost (CAC) have skyrocketed. The cost of any sale has soared.

We live in an era of hyperinflation in the cost of advertising and trust. The cost per click on Yandex is rising faster than gold or Bitcoin, if that makes it easier to understand.

At the same time, AI works as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, deepfakes are destroying trust in the media. We no longer believe what we see on the screen. On the other hand, it has now become easier to create thousands of pieces of content, practically single-handedly (something that used to require entire teams). Some call this “vibe marketing,” while others refer to it as “content factories.”

Experienced entrepreneurs who see these trends are starting new businesses not by creating products (that’s already very simple), but by testing sales channels, trust, audience, and AI scaling. In other words, by starting with that very vibe marketing and “content factories.”

I’ve identified 5 main “audience- and AI-content-driven” approaches for myself

1. Programmatic SEO. 10,000 articles to get noticed by Google or Yandex. Things like “neighborhood-brand-reviews-buy” or “10-best-X-2026.”

2. Outreach-first products. 100 emails/LinkedIn/Telegram messages to the first 100 customers in a single niche segment (Apollo, Instantly). This usually works best in B2B, where the average deal size is $5k.

3. Media/Community-first products. We create content, build an email list, and establish a community or Telegram channel with the right target audience, then test different products on that audience.

4. Classified-first. We post hundreds of ads on Avito/Craigslist/Fiverr/HH/eBay/Amazon/WB

5. Event-first. We host an event or webinar. Then we repurpose it into a variety of videos, articles, etc. If it works—we scale it up.

Moreover, I try not to be the cobbler without shoes. During the New Year’s holidays, for example, I built a WordPress aggregator for various AI tools and news (this ties right into point 1: Programmatic SEO).https://aifounder.ru

And of course, we can’t do without advertising, especially since it’s so expensive these days: for those interested, a course starts today at 7:00 PM Moscow time at Product University, where we’ll continue building similar content machines for vertical videos, SEO, YouTube channels, and so on.