In a recent interview, Palantir CEO Alex Karp argued that as AI accelerates, two groups may have an edge: people who work with their hands, and people who think differently. I had never thought of this specifically, but reading this gave a vague thought some shape.
I realized that the software part of my storybook business is the commodity part. It’s something everyone can do easily now. A printed, bound, shippable thing is different from a PDF that is infinitely copyable. A hardcover book with a specific kid’s face on each page is not.
That is harder than just building software. It gives me a moat. Something I only realized after seeing the interview, but knew deep down. I always feel like I want to make things harder to replicate.
My guess is that about 80% of the people that are openly building on X are ignoring anything not pure software. So that gives me an edge if I dare to have logistics involved. So I got to work.
The results of today are that I have a pipeline with Nano Banana 2 that generates a cover and 10 double-page layouts for the book that tell the story. The story is still not too exciting, but for today character and scene consistency were more important. If I have that locked in, I just update the prompt and I have my storybook consistent throughout.
The result is still flaky and needs more work as I have multiple of the same character showing up and missing body parts in some spreads. The flaky pipeline is the hard part, and the hard part is what sets this apart from others.
Key Insight
The commodity part is the software. The moat is everything software people won’t touch.