The Distill - Gaps In The Market

Greeting Pioneers,

Ai hasn’t come for us all…. yet. The whole human’s being human thing still has some value here and there. Oh, and VCN returns in a major way this week. Our good friend Michael Francis just launched an Ai Application builder - Sedrino - and he’s gonna show you it works on Wednesday - see ya there.

Irreplaceable

Copywriting, lead gen, project planning, brainstorming, coding...the list of skills AI has come for in the last 2 years is impressive.

& yet I'm still spending an unreasonable amount of time designing sales collateral. Landing pages, sales decks, case studies, brochures – the stuff that has to go in front of a buyer and move them towards a yes. I've played around with a few AI tools that aim to take this off my hands but every one has been a let down. I had the same problem when establishing a design system for our app too – nothing came close to replacing a person – even in the drafting stage.

The more I've sat with why, the more I think it's because persuasive visual collateral requires a kind of aesthetic judgment that AI doesn't have. Someone has to understand what your buyer is afraid of, what they need to believe before they'll say yes, and how to sequence information so they land in the right place emotionally by the time they close the document. LLMs like Gemini can help you with that. But good brand collateral designers also have to understand aesthetics and visual balance – how our logo may technically be centered but it’s visually heavy to the left so to experience it centered you have to move it a few pixels right of center. That some wave graphics look like they belong in a children’s book and others project a stoic nature. You need vision and an eye for aesthetics because how something looks has a tremendous impact on how it feels. We can't seem to prompt our way to that yet.

Good news is that makes this one of the more interesting spaces to watch right now. The tooling hasn't caught up, the need is here, and lean AI-native teams are feeling the gap. So someone is eventually going to release something that solves this. Could be you.

In the meantime, if you're a skilled designer, the startup market is wide open for you.

And if you're a founder like me, still doing this by hand at 11pm? Suck it up – we gotta do what we gotta do for sales. This is just another gap we're filling in until someone closes it.

Every month you see Vibe Code Night come around and you say “This is the one! It’s time. I’m finally gonna go.” then every month, you come up with an excuse to stay home.

This time you should follow-through. Michael Francis (very experienced engineer, vibe coding expert and creator of Sedrino) will be here with pizza and a dummy-proof lesson on how to get your next app idea out of your head and into code.

Come through https://luma.com/ga20m3uh

Note’s on The Distill’s co-EICs: Jack Crowdis & Rachel Edenfield

Jack runs the newsletter, helps run KYX. He’s a career startup kid, past founder, and current operator. Weekly contributor. Always editor.

Rachel’s the Founder/CEO of venture-backed Swell, and a driver of KYX. Routinely delivers the city’s sharpest long-form startup advice. Always re-edits Jack’s edits (including this bio).

Know someone who should read this? Forward it, or send them this link.

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Peace, Pioneers ✌️