Prototypes, landing pages and demos are cheap now. Product and distribution design is the part that isn't? [I will not promote]

TL;DR: Anyone can ship a prototype, landing page or demo in a weekend now, so they've stopped proving much. What still matters is deciding what's worth building and designing how it gets into people's lives. Every indie hacker and founder is building right now. With AI tooling, a working prototype or a slick landing page takes a weekend, so everyone ships one. And maybe 1% of them ever get real users or paying customers. Because when everyone can build, "I built a demo and put up a waitlist" or "I built an MVP" doesn't mean anything anymore. Existing isn't feedback. The real advantage is deciding what's actually worth building, and how it enters behaviour people already have. A few things I've seen from my own experiments (15 years as a designer/founder, building a lot of stuff on the side): Launched an app: crickets. Ran the same idea as a script in a subreddit that already wanted it: 852 comments, 25k views. Shared a polished prototype: nothing useful. Reframed it as a question in 3 communities: 30 detailed answers, half my assumptions gone. Skipped building a standalone music app, built a Chrome extension on a website people already use: people loved it, and it became my pitch to the platform itself. Skipped building a new rental platform, tested the idea on an existing one: validated it before building anything of my own. What I focus on now: Design how you ask, not just what you build. Go where your users hang out and frame the problem, not your solution. One Facebook post like that got me 77 comments and 36 pain points. Find the shortest path to a real reaction. Often that's a script, a reply thread or an extension, not an app. Use prototypes to learn the problem, not to pitch your solution. Polish after you find pull. Before that, polish (and new features) is mostly expensive guessing. Did your first real signal come from the product itself, or from something scrappy around it?