If anyone can vibe-code an MVP in a weekend, what makes your product different?
It's crazy how easy building something from scratch has become, but one thing I’ve noticed lately is that more and more products look fresh on the surface, yet feel almost identical underneath.
I see this every day scrolling the PH daily dashboard, struggling to spot the real difference between dozens of products claiming to be the next Lovable with a twist, another distraction-free productivity app, or yet another AI voice assistant.
Just like with copywriting or design, product concepts are starting to feel homogeneous.
It’s as if we’re all feeding the same prompts to ChatGPT or Claude, resulting in ideas that seem original at first glance, but are terribly similar once you look under the hood.
So my question is: if building has become so easy, what makes the real difference?
Building a loyal base of believers who stick with you regardless of clones?
Out-shipping everyone else with updates and new features?
Having the most polished, beautiful product that wins on pure vibes and perception?
Creating an interface and UX so frictionless that similar apps just can't compete?
Probably, it's a mix of all the above, but I’m curious to know if one particular aspect is more important for you and makes a real difference for your product.
Replies
I think building is the easy part now. the hard part is getting people to keep coming back after the fisrt try.
@kabir_suleman_kusfa I agree! For you, what's the most effective strategy to make people keep coming back?
None of your four, I think, and I say that having tried three of them.
All four are things a clone can also do in a weekend. Polish especially. If your moat is UX, someone screenshots it on Sunday and ships it on Monday.
The thing that doesn't copy is evidence. Not a testimonial wall, the specific stuff: this named person at this company had this problem, here's the number before and after, here's them saying it in their own words. A competitor can clone every feature you have and still can't clone that, because it requires having had customers for long enough that they can describe what changed. It's the one asset that gets more expensive to replicate the longer you've existed.
I'd also push back gently on the premise. I don't think products feel homogeneous because building got easy. They feel homogeneous because everyone is describing what the thing does, and capability descriptions converge, they always have. Two products doing the same job will always sound identical when described by their makers. They stop sounding identical the moment actual users describe them, because users talk about their own situation and no two of those are the same.
So the difference isn't something you build. It's something you go and collect, and most people skip it because it's slow and it involves asking.
@venkat_a2 I always try to keep updated and then, discover something new. I didn't know that even UX was so easy to replicate. It seems like, as you say, everything can be cloned nowadays. In which case, I agree with you, the only thing that can't be replicated is real people talking about their personal experience with the product.
I feel like the fact that products look the same goes a bit beyond the makers' descriptions, and also a bit beyond my statement about building being easy. I think (but that's just my opinion) makers lately are heavily focusing on AI, which makes sense considering that it will become more and more important. So, they think about what they can do with AI or which apps could be integrated into bigger systems like ChatGPT or Claude.
I understand it, but I feel like it restricts a bit the opportunity to build something truly different and original. Although AI is important, I think there could be other products not directly connected to it out there that could still be useful. Or at least, I hope our lives won't completely revolve around AI 🙈
@pamela_arienti I think the AI-first thing does something slightly different to what it looks like. It doesn't restrict what can be built, it changes what's scarce. When the building is the cheap part, the expensive part becomes knowing which specific problem is worth solving, and that only comes from being close to someone who has it.
Which is annoying, because it can't be prompted. The most useful thing I shipped this week came from two people in my launch thread telling me where their case studies actually died. Not in the writing, which is the part I had built for, but in getting the customer's legal team to sign the thing off. I would never have got there on my own, and no model was going to tell me either.
So maybe it isn't non-AI products we're short of. It's products where someone went and found something out first.