AI Makes Building Cheap. Attention Still Costs.

Crown & Cleats, the app my son and I built together, is officially published on the App Store.

Technically, it has been there for a little while. I just never posted about it, because apparently my launch strategy was to quietly place it in the App Store and hope the universe handled demand. Still, it’s out there. A real thing. Searchable. Downloadable. Sitting in the App Store like a tiny digital lemonade stand waiting for someone, anyone, to wander by with disposable attention and a mildly supportive thumb.

So far? Zero downloads.

Okay, not actually zero. There are a few. Enough to prove the analytics work. Not enough to suggest we have accidentally disrupted youth soccer, mobile gaming, or for me to quit my job and become an AppStore millionaire.

But hey, that’s part of the lesson. Publishing an app looks like a finish line until you realize it is mostly just opening the door to an empty room. You can hear the fluorescent lights buzzing. You can smell the stale coffee. Somewhere in the distance, a product manager is whispering, “Have you tried marketing TikTok?” Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

That sentence sounds obvious until you build something. Then it becomes personal. You start thinking the world should care because you cared. You confuse effort with demand. You mistake shipping for winning. You start checking dashboards like a raccoon trying to break into a locked cooler.

The market does not grade effort. It barely notices effort. The market is busy, distracted, suspicious, entertained, overwhelmed, and somehow still watching a video of a guy restoring a cast iron pan from 1912. I know. I’m that guy.

So maybe the silence is useful. Maybe a few sad little download numbers are better than applause. Applause teaches you to repeat yourself. Silence makes you ask harder questions.

Why would anyone care? Who is this for? Where do they already spend time? What pain are we solving? How do we explain it before they get bored and return to whatever tiny dopamine casino lives in their hand?

AI has made building cheap. The time cost is real: designig, debugging, frustration, and the occasional moment where you question every life choice that led you to Xcode. But the cost of getting from idea to working product has collapsed.

A kid with curiosity, a parent with patience, and a handful of AI tools can now build something that would have required a small team, a budget, and a very serious-looking project plan not that long ago.

That’s incredible.

It also means the world is about to be flooded with half-built apps, clever demos, charming prototypes, and products whose entire go-to-market strategy is, “I posted once.”

God help us all.

When building gets cheaper, attention gets more expensive. That’s the part people miss. AI will make it easier to create products, content, apps, agents, games, tools, workflows, and other small digital creatures that crawl out of our brains at 11:47 p.m.

But distribution will still be brutal. Maybe more brutal. Because now everyone can build. Everyone can ship. Everyone can make something that looks credible enough to deserve a second glance. The scarce things will be your brand, story, timing, and the ability to explain why anyone should care before they wander off to watch a man pressure wash a driveway.

Marketing is going to matter more. The machines gave us leverage over production. Distribution is still yours to figure out. My son has already moved on to his own shit, which feels emotionally correct.

Kids do not usually sit around doing quarterly business reviews on side projects with their fathers. They build, they laugh, they get bored, they find the next thing.

For me, Cleats & Crown was never just an app.

It was a daddy-son project. A reason to sit together and make something. A way to show him that ideas can become real if you keep pulling the thread. A way to let AI become less abstract and more like a messy collaborator that occasionally helps and occasionally behaves like an unpaid intern with confidence issues. We finished something, which is more than most ideas ever manage. Even if the App Store responded with the warm indifference of a government office.

You never really know which childhood experiences will stick. Maybe he forgets the app entirely. Maybe Cleats & Crown becomes a random footnote in his memory, somewhere between snacks, soccer, and me saying, “Wait, come back, we still have more to finish.” Or maybe something lodged deeper.

Maybe he learned that building is possible. That tools are learnable. That ideas are not sacred little clouds. They are things you can drag into the world, badly at first, then slightly less badly.

Maybe he learned that finishing matters.

Maybe he learned that finishing is not enough.

That would be a pretty damn good lesson.