"Ship fast" is dead. The new rule is "Think slow".

"Ship fast" was the motto of almost every founders and indie hackers for years, especially on Twitter. Build something in a weekend, put it online, see if people care and pay something, repeat.

Honestly, I never thought it was a good advice for the majority, but it worked for some people for a while.

That’s not the case anymore.

Yesterday, I saw a lot of posts on Twitter (like Olly’s one) about how indie hacking is dying, slop is everywhere etc. I agree with most of it, but I don't like the conclusion many people draw from it, which is basically: it's over, everything has been built, there's no room left.

I don't think so, but one thing is sure: the rules of the game have changed.

But I think the game itself is still very much on!

What Uneed taught me

I run Uneed, a launch platform that receives more than 300 product submissions every single day. Reviewing that flow gives you a strange vantage point on the market 😅. Two things are impossible to miss.

1️⃣ Everyone is building the same things. The same AI wrappers, the same "convert X to PDF", the same SaaS that writes your blog posts, etc. Creativity is basically dead lol. And that's actually good news: when everyone looks alike, standing out is easier!

2️⃣ The entry barrier is gone. Quality and perseverance also. Building a product used to take weeks of work, which naturally filtered out the least committed people, required experience etc. Today it takes a few prompts (sometimes only one 😂). The result is a flood of products built in an afternoon and abandoned the next day.

The noise is not the market

All these shitty products make a lot of noise. Founders try every easy trick AI makes possible, filling the internet with AI-generated blog posts, social media with fake images and UGC content, and our inbox with super lame cold emails.

The side effect is that many founders feel hopeless. Scroll X or LinkedIn for ten minutes and you'll believe you're one among 100 million people selling the same thing to the same audience. I’m sure you’ve felt that way at least once!

But that feeling comes from the noise, not from the market. Cut through it and honestly, not much has changed. There are still countless underserved niches, mostly for non technical people who will never build their own product. There are still plenty of services to build, even in crowded fields like development and design.

The opportunities didn't disappear, they just get lost in the crowd.

What doesn't work anymore

If the opportunities are still there, why do so many launches go nowhere? For one thing:

You can’t just be:

• Shipping a "meh" product with an "okayish" landing page. You’ll just have the same shitty thing that your neighbor.
• Generating 50 UGC videos and spamming cold emails. Everyone has access to the same automation, so people have learned to ignore it already!! Do you even consume that type of content yourself?
• Switching ideas every three days. When AI builds things in hours, abandoning a project feels easy, I know the feeling. It makes you feel like you tried hard. You didn't. You maybe tried a lot of things, but briefly.

And then hoping customers will magically show up 😬.

All these habits optimize for speed and volume. The problem is that speed and volume are now commodities, everyone has them!

An example

Let me give you a concrete example. Two weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with a founder whose story perfectly sums up what I'm trying to say in this post.

She spent many years working in amusement parks and museums. Over time, she noticed that all of them had the same problems.

The people working there aren't retail/shops experts at all.

They don't know how to manage inventory, plan discounts, track what actually sells etc. Staff turnover is high. The shop is often an afterthought for the management.

It's a very specific niche, full of real problems, run by people who are mostly non technical.

So she built a SaaS for it, selling high ticket subscriptions! She goes into the parks and museums herself, demos the product, trains the staff, and helps them significantly increase their profits.

She's already making real money, and I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up owning that market really soon!!

She didn't produce UGC content, sent annoying cold emails or anything. She just knew a market super well, took her time, and built one useful thing.

Why her approach works

Her story isn't luck. It's the exact opposite of the "ship fast" playbook, that’s it 😅.

She started from a problem, not from a tool. She didn't ask "what can I build with AI this weekend?". She asked "what's broken in a world I know by heart?"

She has knowledge and network. Anyone can clone a SaaS in a few days now, but nobody can clone years of experience and networking in a small and specific world.

Her customers are non technical. Park and museum (Makes me thing of the tv show parks and recreation, I loved it 🥰😂) managers aren't using AI everyday to build products, they probably don’t even know it’s possible lol

Her distribution doesn't scale, and that's a feature!! Visiting customers, training staff on site etc, it's super slow and it's exactly what lazy competitors will never do. They will keep building 50 landing pages a week with AI while she slowly build trust and customer base.

She charges for the value she creates. When your product visibly increases a shop's profits, you don't need thousands of users, UGC content etc: 10-20 customers are enough to build a great business that will last!

How to think slow

First thing: by "think slow”, I don’t mean "build slowly" 😅. AI is an incredible tool and you should use it to build, you would be stupid to not use it tbh.

But it means spending your time where AI can't help you: like deciding what's worth building.

A few things that help:

• Look at your own past. Every job you've had, every hobby, every community you belong to is a market you understand better than most, and it would probably also be easier to stay longer in the game if you like it.
• Think without AI, sometimes. Asking a model for startup ideas gives you the same ideas it gives everyone else 😂
• Pick one thing and stick with it!! Give a project months, not days, please! A lot of products fail because they were abandoned too early, because founders just blindly followed what an AI feed by 2020 content told them, without using their brain 😬 (sorry, I’m harsh).
• Aim for genuinely good, not just shipped. A shipped product doesn’t mean anything anymore, everyone can do it. A product people love and recommend is what you want!

The new rule

The flood of AI built products isn't going to stop, I’m pretty sure of that.

Fighting it with more speed and more volume is a losing game, because… Well, everyone is doing that.

The founders who will win in the next few years are the ones who step out of that race, the ones who know a market deeply, take the time to understand their customers and the problem they’re solving, and build one thing that genuinely matters.

"Ship fast" is dead. The new rule is "Think slow".

Thomas