What AI cannot do.
Or what most others cannot do.
That might be where the edge is now.
Here’s why.
Recently, Gleam made waves on Twitter, at least in my corner of it, by taking an abandoned app from almost zero to $120k in 30 days.
They did it with one account posting talking videos that were 9 to 10 minutes long.
And they crushed it. Most of the time, the app only gets mentioned near the end. So the viewer is fully bought into the story first, then comes the CTA, and it lands.
The account is close to 100M views, and some videos have around 30k comments. The engagement is insane.
But here is the catch.
First, good luck finding a creator who can speak this well and carry a story off the top of their head for 10 minutes.
There is almost no editing, and it is done in one take, which actually makes it very doable if you have the right person in front of the camera.
Second, there is the cost. A creator like this will probably already be more expensive than average. Then once they get close to 500k followers and keep pulling huge outlier numbers, it likely stops making financial sense.
In his newer videos, it looks like he is promoting another app from the Gleam team, WIP habit tracker. I am curious how long that still works economically, especially if the deal is paid on a CPM type basis.
This long talking format is a real differentiator. It does not even have to be 10 minutes. It can be shorter and still follow the same style.
This language app is doing similar videos now, and one of them hit 11M. This version has a few cuts, but you can still see the pacing and the creator’s charisma.
Again, a lot depends on your economics and your ability to find creators this strong. But if you can, it gives you an edge over everyone else.
My broader point, or maybe theory, is that doing what AI cannot do will become a bigger edge over time. Because you are not just competing against AI. You are competing against everyone else, and most of them will probably take the easy route with AI content and mass posting.
That is not where you want to play. It gets crowded fast. Too much of the same, too much dense competition. Maybe there are still some angles there for now, but over time it will only get worse.
So eventually, the edge becomes whatever still feels deeply human. People can already spot what looks AI made. And the thing that may matter most is human made emotional storytelling.
At the end of the day, there is no fixed rule.
It has been more than 18 months since the channel became more widely known and since we posted our first Twitter threads. The playbook itself has also been around for years. During that time, people kept saying this is dead, that is dead. Some even said TikTok was dead.
And yet here we are. Sora is dead, while Reels are still thriving.
What is more interesting than random unqualified Twitter people predicting everything and nothing are theories like Andrew Chen’s “law of shitty clickthrough rate.”
When a distribution channel matures, it gets harder to compete. Costs rise. CPMs go up. But there are two things worth noting.
First, we are assuming Reels and TikTok are already fully mature, and I do not think that is completely true yet, especially for Reels.
Second, these platforms are so large that they contain many smaller pockets of attention inside them. In practice, they act like sub platforms with different content habits and expectations.
That means there are still many ways to create content variations. It is not as static as something like cold email, where users adapted to the patterns pretty quickly. Social platforms behave differently because people are constantly selling in new ways, directly or indirectly, which normalize this more.
Yes, it is harder than yesterday, but it is still the best channel for B2C mass acquisition, and it should stay that way for a while longer.
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