Everyone Wants to Be Famous

Every few years someone publishes the stat. Kids want to be YouTubers more than astronauts. This gets shared with a tone of concern, like something has gone wrong. I'm 20. Most of my friends want to be internet famous. And I think they're onto something that most people in tech haven't fully processed yet.

Being internet famous is a distribution strategy. That's obvious. What's less obvious is that our entire generation has internalized this as the default path to building anything. Not “build a thing, then figure out how to get people to use it.” More like “become the person people already listen to, then figure out what to build.”

This is a fundamental inversion of how startups have worked. The traditional model is product-first. You build something, you find product-market fit, then you pour money into distribution. The new model skips the last step entirely. Distribution is the starting condition, not the outcome.

And it's working. MrBeast launches Feastables and it does nine figures in revenue. Logan Paul and KSI launch Prime and it outsells Gatorade in certain markets. These aren't celebrity endorsement deals. The celebrity is the company. The audience is the moat.

Take Cluely. Their founder went viral. The product is an AI cheating tool — it's genuinely bad, ethically and functionally. And I'm writing about them right now. That's the point. The product doesn't matter yet because the distribution already happened. They got into your head through a tweet or a TikTok or a hot take, and now they exist in the conversation whether they deserve to or not. The product can be in decline — it is in decline — and they're still taking up mental real estate. That's what distribution buys you. Time. Even when the underlying thing isn't working.

I've watched friends at Stern talk about building a personal brand before they have a product. Before they have an idea. They're accumulating audience like it's inventory — something you stockpile now because it'll be useful later. They might be right.

The VC world has noticed. There's a reason every partner at every fund is posting on X and LinkedIn now. Distribution used to be something you bought. Ads, sales teams, partnerships. Now distribution is something you are. And if distribution is the hardest part of building a company — which it usually is — then being the distribution channel yourself is a genuine structural advantage.

The problem is what happens when everyone figures this out at the same time. If every founder is optimizing for audience-first, then having an audience stops being a differentiator. It becomes table stakes. The same way every startup in 2015 needed a mobile app, every startup in 2028 might need a founder with 100K followers just to get a first meeting. Having no audience won't mean you're focused on product. It'll mean you don't understand how the game works.

Which means the thing that currently looks like an edge is converging toward a commodity. We're all early to a trade that's about to get very crowded.

And then the bottleneck flips back to product. Back to the thing that's actually hard to build. The audience-first model works when attention is the scarce resource. When everyone has attention, the scarce resource becomes the thing worth paying attention to. Cluely is the preview of this. All distribution, no product. It got them in the door. It won't keep them in the room.

So maybe the future is a generation of founders who are all great at distribution, competing on product quality again. The whole cycle resets, except now everyone knows how to go viral and nobody knows how to build something that lasts beyond the first viral moment.

We're not wrong to want to be internet famous. We're just early to a strategy that will stop working right around the time we've mastered it.