Build the Presence Product
How do you find your moat in a world where everyone is a builder?
The Last Moat
The tools of creation are being democratized. This is the great leveling. The cost of building, of expressing an idea in code, is racing to zero.
The old moats are evaporating. Technical skill, access to capital, complex distribution—all flooded.
A new question emerges. When everyone is a builder, how does anyone get found?
When the game changes, you don't play harder. You find a different game.
Presence is the Product
In an age of infinite replication, the only thing that cannot be copied is you. Your taste. Your philosophy. Your hard-won point of view.
The most defensible product is not about utility. It’s about presence. A Presence Product - a product that acts like a virtual you, encoded with your presence.
The product may be temporary. The presence is permanent.
Like Naval said, no one can compete with you at being you. This is the last moat.
(How to build a presence product? We will leave that to a future post.)
The Forge of Self
So where does this presence come from? It isn't a brand you invent. It’s a truth you uncover.
You don’t build for a market of millions. You build for a market of one—yourself. You solve your own problem, again and again, until the solution is effortless.
This is Friction Forging. A process of personal obsession. You aren’t iterating on user feedback. You are iterating on your own life. You are the first and most important user.
You hammer away at your own friction until the process is smooth, elegant, and uniquely yours. You’re not just shipping a solution. You’re shipping the wisdom you bled for.
The quirks you discovered. The shortcuts you earned. The mistakes you made.
Don’t hide the journey. Your scars are your features.
The Signal, Not the Noise
Once you’ve forged this presence into a product, how do you find your people?
You don’t. They find you.
Marketing is shouting. It’s persuasion. It’s trying to convince the unwilling. This is a losing game. It’s expensive and it’s exhausting.
The new game is filtering.
You practice Audience Sonar. You send out a signal—your philosophy, your unique way of seeing the world. You share your problem and your path to solving it. You broadcast your frequency.
Most will hear nothing. That is the point.
You are not looking for everyone. You are waiting for the echo. The few who are already tuned to your frequency will hear it. They will recognize your problem as their own. They will trust your solution because they trust your journey.
Your marketing shouldn’t be a megaphone. It should be a tuning fork.
When you stop persuading and start filtering, the right people are not converted. They are revealed.
Build a Presence Product, born from Friction Forging, found through Audience Sonar.
Creation is not about building something with better features and more utilities. It's about becoming a better you, and then embedding that self into everything you make.
That is the work. And that is the one thing AI will never be able to do for you.
