Building the App Got Easier. Getting Users Didn't.
AI can help you build an app in days.
It cannot make people care.
That's becoming one of the clearest patterns in my conversations with app builders on App Minded.
People who couldn't have built software a few years ago are now shipping apps with Claude, Cursor, Replit, Lovable and other AI tools.
Then they hit the next problem.
Distribution.
What happens after you build the app?
You have to find users.
This sounds obvious, but the speed of AI development makes it easy to ignore.
When building software required months of work and a development budget, there was a strong incentive to think about the market first.
Now you can have something working before you've seriously answered:
- Who needs this?
- Where do those people already spend time?
- What are they doing instead?
- Is this problem painful enough for them to change their behaviour?
- Will they pay?
- How will they discover the app?
AI reduced the cost of getting the first version wrong.
It didn't remove the need to answer those questions.
Sometimes the problem isn't painful enough
El Wong learned this from a pickleball app.
She wanted to combine two things she was interested in: pickleball and building with AI.
The app organized games, courts, payments and reminders.
There was a clear problem. Organizing games through messages could be messy.
But after getting feedback, she discovered something more important.
People were okay with the mess.
They already knew how to use text messages. They didn't want to sign up for another app badly enough to change.
That's an easy mistake to make.
A problem can exist without creating a market.
Talk to users before launch
Barbora took a different route with Xroad Studio.
She already had potential beta testers before the product launched.
When it was ready, she emailed them.
Some tested it. Some became customers.
One of her first customers came from something even simpler: a WhatsApp group.
Someone mentioned that they were looking for a content-distribution tool. Barbora told them to wait two weeks because hers was about to launch.
They tried it.
They stayed.
More importantly, that customer became a useful source of feedback because they were actually using the product.
That's very different from asking a room full of people what features they'd like.
Paying-user feedback beats hypothetical feedback
People love suggesting features.
- Wouldn't it be cool if...
- You should add...
- Have you thought about...
Some of those suggestions will be excellent.
Some will send you months in the wrong direction.
Barbora uses a useful filter when someone suggests something: are you actually going to use the product if I build that?
A paying customer who encounters the same problem every week is giving you evidence.
Someone casually brainstorming features is giving you an idea.
Those aren't the same thing.
Marketing is part of the product
El describes building the app as one half of the job and getting it out to people as the other half.
She isn't alone.
Again and again, builders tell me some version of the same thing: the build was possible. Distribution was harder.
That's partly because marketing is a completely different skill set.
You have to work out where your audience is.
Then you need positioning.
Messaging.
App Store pages.
Content.
Search.
Social.
Partnerships.
Communities.
Outreach.
Maybe paid acquisition.
And underneath all of it, you need a product people actually want enough to talk about, recommend or pay for.
Your first users don't need to come from a giant launch
The Xroad Studio story is a good reminder of this.
An early customer didn't come from a viral TikTok.
They came from a WhatsApp group.
That's distribution.
For another app, the first users might come from:
- a niche Reddit community
- an existing email list
- an App Store search
- a Facebook group
- people following the founder on LinkedIn
- a professional community
- TikTok search
- a newsletter
- a podcast
- direct outreach
- people who already experienced the problem with you
The useful question isn't:
How do I market an app?
It's:
Where are the first 20 people who already have this problem?
That's much easier to act on.
Build around a problem you understand
One reason so many App Minded guests build from their own lives is that it gives them an advantage.
Kayla didn't have to research whether combining three children's school-supply lists was annoying.
She was doing it.
Jocelyn didn't have to invent a hypothetical DIY problem.
She had three chickens and needed somewhere safe for them to live.
Deepti didn't have to imagine what making food decisions during kidney treatment felt like.
She had lived it.
El knew people organized pickleball games messily because she played pickleball herself.
Personal experience isn't market validation.
But it can give you a much better starting point.
You understand the language.
You understand the existing workaround.
You probably know other people with the problem.
And you can usually tell the difference between a superficial inconvenience and something that genuinely drives people crazy.
Ship before you think you're ready
Jocelyn deliberately fought her instinct to make everything perfect.
She had spent weeks on previous ideas.
With Buildara, she decided "good enough" really could be good enough.
After roughly two focused days, she had a viable product.
Then she could learn from something real.
This is one of AI's biggest advantages for app founders.
Not that it lets you avoid validation.
It lets you get to validation faster.
You can put a working version in someone's hands instead of spending six months arguing about what they might want.
But don't build every idea
The opposite problem is starting to appear too.
When building becomes easy, builders build too much.
Cynthia Vasquez has built enough apps that she now actively reminds herself that having an idea doesn't mean she needs to build it immediately.
Her focus is shifting toward testing, improving and promoting what already exists.
That's a useful constraint.
Before starting another build, ask:
- Does this solve a real problem?
- Who has it?
- How are they solving it today?
- Can I reach those people?
- Why would they switch?
- What would make this worth paying for?
- What is the smallest version that tests the idea?
If you don't know yet, spending another evening prompting Claude isn't necessarily progress.
Distribution should influence what you build
This is where app building and marketing stop being separate jobs.
Suppose you're considering two equally good app ideas.
For one, you know exactly where the users are. There are active communities, obvious search demand and creators already talking about the problem.
For the other, you have no idea how you'd reach anyone.
That should affect the decision.
Distribution isn't something you bolt onto an app after launch.
It can be part of deciding whether the app is worth building at all.
The new bottleneck
AI has changed the economics of software.
More people can build.
More products can launch.
More competitors can appear.
That makes being able to build less unusual than it used to be.
Understanding customers becomes more valuable.
So does taste.
Positioning.
Communication.
Trust.
Distribution.
Knowing which idea deserves to exist.
The people building interesting products with AI aren't only learning how to prompt a coding agent.
They're learning what happens when the code is no longer the biggest barrier.
That's what we talk about on App Minded.