Creators Are Dying On Idea Hill
And I don’t want to end up there
AI has made everything easy.
Writing is easy.
Design is easy.
Coding is easy.
Shipping is easy.
All true. And also wildly misleading. Because what actually got harder is the only thing that ever mattered.
What the hell should we build in the first place.
That is Idea Hill. And creators are dropping like flies on the way up.
Execution is a commodity now
We used to live in a world where execution was the bottleneck. In fact, execution was most of the job marketplace. And that marketplace is going to die soon. That’s why many will lose their jobs.
But it’s only one side of the coin.
The other is… not that simple. It’s the idea.
For centuries, it went like this: If we had a good idea, we still needed
a builder
a developer
a designer
a marketer
time
money
and a mild tolerance for suffering through all the crap that came with it
Now we have Claude Code, Gemini, ChatGPT, Figma AI, Replit, Vercel, Stripe, and ten thousand tools that turn thoughts into shipping products in a weekend. Literally. A weekend.
We can build:
SaaS
landing pages
onboarding flows
newsletters
blogs
mobile apps
Chrome extensions
All before Sunday dinner.
Shouldn’t that have made us all rich by now?
AI zombie apocalypse
Open Product Hunt. Open Twitter. Open Indie Hackers.
What do we see?
“Built in a weekend”
“$0 to $10k MRR”
“AI powered X for Y”
“Notion but for Z”
“Stripe but for A”
Hundreds of polite, well-designed tools… nobody uses….
They are not bad. They are just… unnecessary. So unnecessary! For many reasons.
Most of them solve:
problems nobody feels
for people who already have five tools
with features nobody asked for
that have been done hundreds of times already
This is not a tooling problem. This is an idea problem.
AI is great at how, terrible at why
AI is incredible at:
turning ideas into words
turning words into code
turning sketches into UIs
turning outlines into products
AI is terrible at:
understanding human needs
sensing what’s missing
noticing what is not been done (well)
seeing where the market is wide open
LLMs remix the past. They do not sniff out the future.
So when we ask AI:
“What SaaS should I build?”
We get:
CRM for freelancers
habit trackers
AI note apps
social media schedulers
another writing assistant
something along those lines
The same safe, obvious, overfished ponds. Because that is what the data says people built before. Real ideas do not come from averages. They come from weird edges.
Everyone climbs the same hill
This is where Idea Hill comes in.
Creators all start at the same place:
“I want to build something with AI.” Then they do what seems logical. They ask AI. They search Twitter. They scan Product Hunt. They look at trends.
And they all walk straight up the same crowded path.
The result is predictable.
500 people build the same thing
10 get mild traction
1 wins
489 shut down
Ideas are... tough
Good ideas rarely come from brainstorming.
They come from:
frustration
annoyance
obsession
being in a niche long enough to see the problems
We get ideas from:
being there
living the pain
doing customer support
trying to automate our own workflow
watching people hack together ugly solutions
That stuff does not show up in a prompt.
AI can not feel the pain of:
“Why do I have to export this CSV every week?”
“Why is this workflow so dumb?”
“Why does no tool handle this one stupid edge case?”
Humans do.
Creators feel stuck
So we end up in a strange place.
We can:
write faster than ever
ship faster than ever
iterate faster than ever
But we can’t do anything… other than what’s already been done over and over again.
What should we actually make?
How to not die on Idea Hill
The solution is not more AI. It is more contact with reality.
Real ideas come from:
talking to users
running a business
having a hobby
being deep in a community
being annoyed by tools every day
Instead of asking: “What SaaS should I build?” We should ask: “What problem have I personally tripped over ten times this week?”
Then we let AI do what it is good at.
Execution.
Speed.
Polish.
Scale.
The Bottom Line
I am in this place right now. I am building an app I saw a real need for in my real life. And this app has only two main competitors online. But a pretty good market.
Ideas are the new currency.
AI did not kill creators. It’s killing boring ideas.
When everyone can build, the only thing that matters is what we choose to build. Ideas are now the scarce resource. Not code, not design, not writing.