Attention is All You Need

I think the era of programming we-media has arrived.

In the past, when we wanted to do a project, it would take a lot of time. Design, develop, test, publish — the whole process needed a few months, or even a fucking year. But right now, you can do it in a real quick vibe-coding session, and ship an MVP within a couple hours.

It's like writing a book. In the past, when you wanted to publish an idea, you had to choose the topic, do the editing, proofread, print, distribute. It took a long time. But right now you can publish in a real quick. Just post your idea on Twitter. A couple seconds.

And at this moment, the most important thing changes. Just like I said — we are entering the we-media era.

Attention is all you need.

Imagine you make a great movie. You go through all the processes, you spend a lot of time, and finally people can see it in the cinema. But there is fucking no one. Meanwhile some random livestream is on, and a bunch of people are watching, dropping comments, even sending gifts.

But a lot of people, when they're starting a business, are still thinking: I don't need to find users first. Promotion is not that important. I just need to build the stuff, build the workflow, and use that to find a VC, get the money. Then I'll use that pile of money to do promotion afterwards.

Honestly, I was trapped in this exact idea last year. But I figured out it's fucking wrong. Because this era has already passed.

You could do this two years ago. You can't do it now.

Why? Because two years ago everybody was caring about the concept. AI was pretty new. So you'd say, "Okay, we'll do an AI browser. We'll do AI plus fucking medicine, AI plus fucking health." AI plus this, AI plus that — you'd quickly raise a seed round. Then the seed-stage guy would tell you how to wrap this fucking idea to help you raise a Series A, so he could exit and make money.

That was the old logic. Right now this logic has been turned upside down.

Investors right now are very grounded. If you don't have ARR, no traction, they won't give you any fucking money.

What you need to do now — if you're going toC, it has to be something genuinely useful. Otherwise, you might as well come back to toB.

By the way, I really like the FDE role. In China it's called AIBP, in the US it's called FDE. I'm doing FDE in Shenzhen right now. I'll talk about this with everyone in the next post.

Now back to normal people. I've talked a lot in previous essays about how you should just build an MVP and throw it on social media to test if anyone is interested. If you get a user, keep going. Don't build a fucking heavy code shit on day one.

For normal people — code is pretty cheap right now. You can just vibe-code something. Don't go build some workflow or some complicated system on day one.

First, it might not be what people want.

Second, it's gonna make you start really fucking slow. You'll spend a lot of time thinking about how the workflow should be built. You might even be afraid of building something that big.

For normal people, the most important thing is how fast you can start. Can you ship it this afternoon? Can you ship it before you go to sleep tonight? That's what determines how fast your product can land in front of users, and how fast it can catch their attention.