What’s more impressive: 100 PowerPoint slides that do something clever, or 10,000 lines of code that do something impossible?
Last week, I read about a startup founder who had just secured an investment. The story behind his check was revealing: the investor was impressed that he’d managed to cobble together significant functionality using no-code solutions. The investor’s logic was straightforward—if this founder could accomplish so much with limited tools, imagine what they could achieve with proper resources and a technical team.
It was impressive in its own way, like watching someone build a functional prototype with 100 PowerPoint slides. But it got me thinking about the work I create and how little I talk about it, not just with the outside world, but even with my own friends and cofounder.
Yes, I write this newsletter once in a while with some curious bit, but is that enough?
Take EasySEO, the product I’ve been building. On the surface, it does essentially the same thing today as it did two months ago — it analyzes your websites and tells you how to massively improve its SEO. But describing the iterations between then and now feels almost impossible. It’s like comparing a flip phone to an iPhone—both make calls and send texts, but the underlying complexity and user experience are night and day.
I spent many, many hours making the product what it is today.
The sheer volume of effort is staggering. Even my co-founder, who sees the git commits rolling in, doesn’t fully grasp the technical depth of what’s been built. I’m not saying this to brag—I genuinely question whether I should care about making this work more visible.
When someone does something non-technical, like stringing together 100 PowerPoints, non-technical people can immediately relate. “Wow, that’s a lot of work!” they say. But when you’re doing deep technical work? To most people, it’s just gibberish. It doesn’t look impressive because they can’t parse what they’re seeing.
If building with no-code tools is like making 100 PowerPoints, what I’ve been doing is like making 10,000—except the people who appreciate PowerPoints wouldn’t even begin to understand the medium I’m working in.
Here’s the kicker. I don’t think it’s all that impressive either. Only the end result matters, not the work, or the sacrifice, or the technical challenges.
I had a conversation with another founder friend this morning who’s building an LLM-powered operating system. It could be revolutionary, but I guarantee no one outside a small circle has any idea what he’s actually building. He’s the type who doesn’t care to explain it to people who don’t care to understand.
This creates a peculiar gap in our attention economy. Simple, easily understood projects get celebrated as if they’re incredibly complex. In five years, 99% of these will crash and burn, forgotten because they weren’t that complicated after all. But right now? They command the spotlight.
I like to think of myself and my technical founder friends as following the Elon Musk playbook. In the early days, nobody cares because what you’re building looks like a toy. The hope is to reach the point where your “toy” becomes threatening enough to established players that it transforms from something dismissible into something worth attacking.
Maybe that’s the real measure of technical work—not whether it impresses people today, but whether it survives long enough to become impossible to ignore. The PowerPoint builders get the early attention, but the deep technical work? That’s what actually changes the world.
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Kirill.
p.s. So, should we care about making our technical work more visible, or should we keep our heads down and build until the work speaks for itself? I’m still figuring that out.*
p.p.s. How I feel lately, on one hand. On the other hand, if this were true, a donkey would be the kind of the animal kingdom.