The Ultimate Scarcity in the Age of Unlimited Execution: Profit Intuition
Stop wasting time on "tech demos" that burn your budget. Discover why saying no to 99% of AI features is the secret breakthrough to scaling your startup today.
We are living in an era where the cost of executing anything is approaching zero.
From the outside, it looks like fantastic news, but I believe there’s a massive, silently growing danger in the background: wasting time on the wrong things.
I recently stumbled upon a platform called SkillsMP.
Over 350,000 AI agent skills are sitting there, completely open-source.
What used to take weeks or months of technical infrastructure work is now literally at the speed of “copy, paste, run”.
The cost of software development and doing business in general is plummeting to zero right before our eyes.
Many of my founder friends look at this and get excited: “This is amazing, man! We can instantly turn every feature we think of into code and ship it!”
I think the exact opposite. This isn’t a blessing. In fact, if you ask me, it’s the fastest route to bankruptcy.
We Fired Our Best Consultant: Scarcity
In the past, our resources were limited.
Budgets were tight, time was short, and finding good developers was both hard and expensive.
Truth be told, this “scarcity” was our most honest strategy consultant.
It forced us to throw 99 out of 100 brilliant ideas in the trash and focus on the one thing that would actually move the needle.
In today’s technological landscape, which promises that we can build anything easily, that consultant has been fired. And we haven’t replaced it with anything tangible. I believe we urgently need to.
We’re holding an endless list of “what we can do.” Nowadays, when you ask, “Can we build this?” in a meeting, the answer is almost always “Yes.” And for free, too. But the rules of the game have changed. In this new era where AI has cheapened everything, the real scarcity isn’t in resources—it lies in what I call profit intuition.
What is Profit Intuition?
It’s the ability to instinctively pinpoint the “one move” that will have the biggest impact on your business and revenue in the shortest amount of time, despite the noise and the illusion of endless opportunity.
You can’t fork this from GitHub. You can’t write a prompt to ChatGPT and say, “Give me profit intuition”. It’s an uncopyable skill.
I’ve spent 20 years in this industry and developed over 50 apps. I’ve seen the top of the App Store, and I’ve thrown away projects we spent months on that no one even looked at.
Looking back, the decisions that made me the most money weren’t about what I put on the table; they were about what I took off the table.
Every “no” you say makes the one “yes” you focus on that much stronger.
Every feature you decide not to build makes the product more usable.
Information has been democratized; code has become cheap. But distinguishing between what actually solves a bleeding-neck problem and what is just a cool “tech demo” is still an incredibly rare skill. And Economics 101 dictates: the value of what is rare always goes up.
It’s also worth pointing out that the tools we rely on aren’t exactly neutral.
Don’t get me wrong, these AI “skills” are amazing on paper. But behind the scenes, there’s a rather frustrating commercial reality at play.
Take a close look at skill-based models like Claude.
You ask for a simple, straightforward, two-paragraph answer. Next thing you know, the tool triggers an automated “deep research” loop in the background, pulls up completely unnecessary SWOT analyses, and gets so carried away that it tries to generate the report as a fully coded HTML website.
In the early days, we were all probably blown away by this “show”. But lately, you’ve likely caught yourself wondering, “Why is it showing off so much for absolutely no reason?”
The answer is painfully simple: to burn more tokens in the background. The more tokens it burns, the more money the platform makes.
This reminds me of a very familiar old illusion.
Advertisers working in digital performance marketing know this all too well. Back in the day, we used to meticulously tweak hundreds of manual targeting settings on Meta and Google just to reach the right audience at the right time.
Then, these platforms came along and said, “Don’t sweat the details. Leave the settings to our AI; it will find the perfect audience for you”.
And what happened at the end of the day?
Instead of sending our conversion rates through the roof, the AI just burned through our budgets much faster, effectively allowing the platforms to sell us their own ad inventory at a premium.
We need to take a hard look at the behavior of these “smart” tools today and ask ourselves: are they operating this way for our benefit, or just to pad their own bottom line?
Just because AI can put on a show doesn’t mean we need to make it write code, over-engineer, and do backflips for every little task. There is no need for this waste, and certainly no need to unnecessarily consume the planet’s energy...
I honestly believe that the “I use AI for everything” crowd is, without even realizing it, becoming the latest victim of a new digital fast-food culture.
That’s why the question you need to ask yourself or your team is no longer “Can we build this?”
The right question is: “Is building this worth delaying the core, vital work we need to be doing right now? And what exactly is that vital work for us?”
If the answer to that question makes you and your team uncomfortable, you are on the right track.
Because profit intuition usually forces you to confront the harsh reality your ego doesn’t want to hear.
The Bottom Line
An abundance of capability and production isn’t going to make us stronger.
Something that is abundant for everyone doesn’t give you a competitive edge. But as a side effect, the sheer volume of what is “possible” has made the penalty for losing focus and taking the wrong path far more severe.
We are experiencing a massive paradigm shift:
From Knowledge to Execution: It used to be that people were paid for what they knew.
From Execution to Orchestration: Now, value lies in knowing which capabilities to bring together to solve a real problem.
In the era ahead, your true competitive advantage won’t be hidden in how much you can build; it will be hidden in what you have the courage not to build.