Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page.
If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.
Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.
I'm not entirely sure how that dismisses the CEO's putative argument: they go big on AI precisely because shipping end-to-end is hard, so they think they shouldn't waste resources on tasks that can be automated.
The structure of a good argument would be something like: certain tasks are fundamentally human and impossible to automate (which and why?) and by pushing AI use beyond what is optimal you are actually hurting your employees ability to do those hard parts.
A weaker but still useful argument is that most everything can probably be automated, but frontier models aren't there yet.
I wouldn't say it "dismisses" their argument, but I think AI marketing encourages them to take an over-simplified view of what it takes to ship product. Most folks like a good, simple story, as opposed to the unvarnished truth.
> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
-- H. L. Mencken
It's like the classic scenario, where you lash-up a barely functional UI demo, and the manager cuts your development schedule by 90%, because you "already have it working." That taught me to never do a lash-up demo. If I show something to someone, it is ship-quality (but often incomplete). It's a technique that I've used for years, and is a great way to involve nontechnical stakeholders, without risking stuff like "it's already working."
All that said, I think that AI definitely could automate a lot of the repetitive stuff involved in shipping. It's just that the CEO would fire the folks that could teach it, before it can learn, because they think that what they do, is "unimportant."
I hate to use a throwaway, but this bit:
> with a functioning user acquisition funnel
How do you actually get this. I've got a product, the site is hand crafted, shows the complex product really well (and had good feedback on it) but how do I acquire the users?
It seems as the cost of creating software has plummeted, it's the actual sales side of it that's going to matter even more. I'm stuck at this point.
"How do I acquire users" is the entire function of sales and marketing. A single HN comment explaining how to do sales and marketing, which is highly dependent on your product and market (and much more difficult than technical people tend to believe), is a bit unrealistic. And a great opportunity to use Claude/ChatGPT for something other than code. There's no silver bullet but as a springboard you can think about:
Who is your ideal customer profile (look up buyer personas) -- if you're B2B figure out both the profile of the company who would buy, as well as the person who would actually buy, and the person who would actually use the software: remember that buyer != user in B2B scenarios, and you'll have to figure out if the buyer, user or both is the best path to getting a sale. If you're B2C figure out your buyer personas so you know where to advertise.
Why would people want your product; sounds like you may already have this down but be ready to explain your value proposition concisely.
How will these people hear about your product -- a SaaS that falls in the woods doesn't make a sound, you need people to learn your product exists before they can pay for it. This is the point of figuring out buyer personas, you need to meet your customers where they are, and you can't know where they are unless you know who they are. This is highly dependent on your product/personas, and could range from running LinkedIn ads to SEO to having a Bluesky brand account to going to local meetup groups or conferences and trying to get your first handful of users in-person.
[dead]
Get a dozen users word of mouth? They will tell friends? Won’t scale forever but it gets you going.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the cost of creating software has not, bloatware definitely has.
[dead]