I saw an open-source batch-rewriting project, and my first reaction wasn’t admiration — it was regret. Why did nobody publish the books it produced? What use is just the tool? The Count of Monte Cristo rewritten in the voice of Dream of the Red Chamber — that would be delightful. But he never showed me the book. I wanted to read the book, not look at his tool.
That’s the line between a content business and a coding business. Tools get stolen: this project will be copied within days — if Tencent wanted the feature, it ships tomorrow. Content doesn’t get stolen: Dream of the Red Chamber retold by a forum troll is genuinely appealing, like someone dubbing GTA in northeastern dialect. The code can be copied. The flavor can’t.
And the use cases are everywhere: e-commerce copy rewritten endlessly, social posts refreshed, books revoiced — once in northeastern accents, once in livelier language. The key: not one source text with many prompts, but many source texts with many prompts. A Cartesian product, at scale. That’s the shape of the business.
Someone will say tools are the real need, content is fluff. It’s backwards. Tool commoditization deepens by the day until everyone competes on price; content differentiation compounds — because what users remember is never your assembly line. It’s the book that came out of it.
Tools sell possibility. Content sells results. People pay only for results.
