Curation in The Age of AI

AI has given millions of people the ability to create amazing content in new ways that we hadn't previously imagined. It has also given millions of people the ability to create the same content that has been recycled through these models over and over again and spam networks with thoughtless, subpar slop. Anyone can generate something that looks polished but very few are creating something worth paying attention to.

With this massive spike in content, now more than ever, there is so much noise you have to wade through to get to the good stuff. The bottleneck has shifted from creation to discovery.

That's where I think curation becomes the real unlock.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I believed community will create winners in the age of AI. I think we are starting to see this play out in practice but honestly in a more extreme way than I had originally anticipated. It's not just communities winning, it's entire products being built around high quality curation for specific audiences and I think the model for how these products get built is about to fundamentally change.

Let me explain what I mean.

If you look at most social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, they are great general platforms that help surface content you are interested in from all walks of life which is great. But this generalized curation also makes it difficult to index on the content you are looking for in the current moment.

The algorithm knows you like food content. It doesn't know you're hungry right now, standing in a neighborhood you've never been to, looking for somewhere to eat in the next 20 minutes.

A great example of what I see as the alternative is what the team at Seekeasy is doing. They have specifically indexed creator content around restaurants and food and created an experience around that content. When you open the app, not only do you see the food related content you are looking for at a specific moment, the whole app is designed around that content. Restaurants near you, the distance, creating a reservation, getting the hours, all of it indexed within the application itself.

This is the part that matters. It's not just curation, it's curation paired with utility. The curation is what gets you in the door and the utility is what makes it indispensable. A generalized platform will never build reservation flows and distance filters into their content feed because they're optimizing for everything which means they can never make the specific product decisions that a verticalized product can.

Letterboxd is another example of this same pattern. The same film content exists across Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube but by building an entire product around that specific intent, the reviews, the lists, the tracking, the community discourse, they created something that none of those general platforms could replicate even if they wanted to. A general platform could add a movie review feature tomorrow but it would never feel the same because the entire product isn't oriented around that intent.

But here's where I think it gets really interesting and why I believe this is bigger than just a few vertical apps doing well in their category.

The cost and speed of shipping product has dropped dramatically. You don't need to build one massive platform that tries to do everything anymore. You can spin up individual apps, each one curating a different stream of content, each one purpose-built around a specific intent, but all connected within one ecosystem. Instead of one bloated product you get a constellation of focused ones sharing the same underlying infrastructure.

Think about what that actually looks like in practice. A company doesn't have to choose between food and film and travel and fitness. It builds one app for each, each one making product decisions that a generalized platform structurally cannot make, but all of them sitting on the same data layer, the same identity system, the same monetization rails. Each individual app is simple and focused. The ecosystem is what compounds.

I think this model beats the super app approach that tries to cram everything into one interface and it beats the generalized feed that serves everything to everyone. A network of purpose-built products, each one the best version of itself for a specific intent, each one benefiting from being part of something larger.

And the niches aren't small anymore, they just look small from the perspective of someone trying to build for everyone. Food content alone is one of the largest categories on every major platform. Film. Fitness. Music. Travel. Each of these can sustain multiple massive companies on their own. We are past the point where verticalization is a compromise. It's the strategy.

A long time ago, I wrote about this popular concept of crossing the chasm and how we always start with the early adopters and move our way up from niche to a generalized audience. But what's interesting nowadays is even niche categories are starting to become big enough markets that you don't necessarily need to cross the chasm at all. The internet and accessibility of information has made it so more and more of these niches can connect and grow like never before and there are real billion dollar businesses to be built on the other side of it.

AI created the content flood that makes curation valuable but it's also what makes the response possible. The same tools that let anyone generate content are letting small teams spin up focused products faster than ever. Fine tuned models for specific domains, vertical apps like Seekeasy, dev tooling built around a single workflow. This is the advantage I believe startups have to look for. Where most large companies are building generalized platforms, startups must look at verticalized curated segments where the inherent nature of being general stops the platform from making the same decisions you as a company can.

The generalist's breadth is their constraint which can make specificity your moat.

I think the companies that figure out how to turn curation into a product and not just a feature will be the ones that define this next era. I'm curious to see which niches break out first and who builds the infrastructure that connects them.