On Lovable, one of the most popular AI app builders, people now start around a million new projects a week, according to the company. Lovable says about 80% of its users aren’t technical, and founders, designers and people in sales are its fastest-growing groups.

A few years ago, someone like that would have had to hire a developer or settle for a no-code template. Now they describe what they want, and AI writes the code and puts the site online. These tools have improved a lot just in the last year, so many more people are using them now.

If you can put a product together over a weekend, so can someone else. It’s unclear how many of those million weekly projects ever get paying customers, but standing out is already getting harder.

We think 3 things matter more now than they did a year ago.

1. Knowing your customers.

If you’ve run a language school for a few years, you know why students quit and what would make them stay, and it’s often not what an outsider would guess. Until recently, turning that into a product meant finding a developer and a budget, but now you can build the first version yourself.

Someone else can build an app for language schools over a weekend, too, but they won’t know which problem it should solve.

2. Keeping your product safe after launch.

Even developers are careful with this part. In a recent Stack Overflow survey, 67% of developers who use AI said they use it to write code, but only 20% use it to deploy or run live systems.

And when security researchers test AI-built apps, they often find services that are easy to overload with requests, wrong settings and so there can be someone who will be able to see what data, and secret keys left right in the code. While you’re the only user, these problems stay hidden, and your customers are the first to run into them.

When so many apps are built over a weekend, one that doesn’t break or leak customer data already stands out.

3. Being easy to find.

More and more people ask AI assistants what to buy or whom to hire. Adobe found that in the first quarter of 2026, traffic from AI assistants to US online stores was almost five times higher than a year earlier, and these visitors were more likely to buy than other visitors. A year ago, it was the other way around.

Adobe only looked at US online stores, and this traffic is still a small share. But it’s growing fast, so if your customers start asking AI where to buy, your website should clearly say what you sell and for how much.

Most of this you can handle on your own. Start with something rough and show it to a few people who might buy it.

Before real customers and their data are in the product, bring in a specialist. Usually one person is enough, someone who spends a few hours a month checking access settings, setting up backups and monitoring, and who knows what to do if something breaks.

Almost anyone can build a product now, so focus on what AI can’t do for you, and check what it does.