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There Is No Demand for Average

Naval said it. Designers are relearning it. AI raises the floor of what every tool can produce. The floor of what anyone actually pays for rises with it. Sustainable demand lives above the default.

The Line​

In April 2026, designer Jamey Gannon (@jameygannon) quote-tweeted a post celebrating "Claude Design" killing design agencies. The original tweet showed a handsomely designed harvest-sale email from a fruit company called Mangones, captioned "It's so over for agencies. Pack it up, apply to trade school."

Jamey's reply, quoting Naval Ravikant, was six words:

"there is no demand for average"

Naval has said this many times in many forms, most famously in his podcast. The line names a confusion running loose in the AI discourse: the idea that because AI can now produce output that is competent, the work that used to require real skill is done.

It is not. The floor rose. What anyone will pay for moved up with it. The gap between them is where the entire economy actually lives.

The Floor Rose. Demand Did Not Move to the Floor.​

AI made competent output trivially accessible. Clean layouts, readable copy, passable photography, functional apps. The ugliness floor dropped. The competence floor rose. This is real.

There is a brief blip of demand for novelty and then nothing. The first wave of "look what AI can do" gets attention because the mechanism is new. That blip ends fast. It is already ending. What remains is what was always there: demand for differentiation with clear utility, delivered with taste.

When the floor is "fine," the cost of being only fine goes up. Fine is the default setting. Everyone has access to fine. Fine is not a reason to pick you, pay you, install you, wear you, or keep you around next year.

This is the market dynamic underneath The Slopacalypse. AI is producing an unprecedented flood of purposeless output that looks polished because polish is now cheap. Polished is the new baseline noise. Above the baseline is where real buyers live.

Beauty Is Utility​

A lot of the utility in any consumer product is in beauty. Design skeptics miss this.

It is why you chose the apps on your phone. It is why you are wearing what you are wearing. It is why you have kept one tool for five years and abandoned three others after a week. The ones that stuck did not stick because they were the most functional things available. They stuck because they felt like you. Their interface, typography, photography, proportions, motion, and weight in your hand made you feel something.

People pay for the feeling. The feeling is the utility. And the feeling is downstream of design choices that baseline AI tools cannot make on your behalf, because those choices are not about execution. They are about taste, conviction, and understanding a specific person deep enough to reach past "safe and competent."

Strip the beauty and you strip out most of what anyone was buying in the first place.

What This Means for Designers​

Designers are not going away. Design changed.

Agentic design tools will keep rolling. Claude Design, Figma Make, and five more things nobody has shipped yet. The floor will keep rising. The floor of what people will pay for will rise with it.

Your job as an augmented designer is to be clearly above the new floor. Produce things an AI tool by default would not produce: specific, considered, opinionated, beautiful. Use the new tools as leverage to do more of the work you already do well. The average output they make easy is a trap to avoid, not a destination to settle into.

If you are a non-designer wondering whether you still need designers: yes, more than ever, if you want to do anything commercially durable. The baseline is the commoditized zone. The ceiling is where demand concentrates.

Beyond Design​

This is not only about design. It is about every field AI touches.

If your output is at the floor, the floor rising does not save you. A lot of people are going to discover this the hard way. The first year of cheap AI output feels like a gold rush to the people flooding the market with it. Then the market remembers what it has always known: it pays for differentiation, not for volume.

For code, writing, research, strategy, consulting, content, teaching, the question stays the same: what are you doing that the floor does not do on its own?

The Survivor Economy inside companies is one expression of this. The Raise the Floor dynamic inside organizations is another. Both point to the same fact. Baseline capability is getting commoditized. Above-baseline capability is where the money, the status, and the durable work live.

What to Do​

Pick work the floor cannot do by default. Work that requires a specific taste, a specific voice, or a specific understanding of a specific person or problem. If a baseline tool could produce what you produce without you in the room, the market will eventually figure that out.

Use AI to raise your ceiling. The tools are leverage. They amplify whatever you already are. If you are at the floor, they keep you at the floor faster. If you are above the floor, they accelerate you past everyone who is not. (See Crutching for the failure mode.)

Protect the parts of your work that are about taste and conviction. Those are the parts no baseline tool can reproduce. They are also the parts most vulnerable to erosion if you outsource your judgment to the default output.

The bar keeps rolling forward. A year from now, the baseline will be sharper than what any tool produces today. The floor of what people are willing to pay for will be higher still. This is not a crisis. This is the shape of the economy in every era. AI makes it more true, faster.

Naval said it. Jamey repeated it. Build like you believe it.

There is no demand for average.

Further Reading​

  • The Slopacalypse: The flood of AI-polished output that looks fine and serves nobody. The business-model consequence of building at the baseline.
  • Raise the Floor: The organizational flywheel that lifts baseline capability inside a company. The floor rising is the dynamic this concept describes at the market level.
  • The Survivor Economy: Inside companies, the same sorting is underway between people stuck at the baseline and people clearing it.
  • Slop Factory: What a business becomes when it industrializes average output. The opposite of this concept's instruction.
  • Don't Scale Slop: Baseline AI output scaled is just more baseline at higher volume. Fix the process before multiplying it.
  • Crutching: How you end up at the baseline even when you started above it.
  • Signalmaxxing: Being above the noise. The input-side discipline that shapes what your above-baseline output actually is.
  • Minimum Commercial Viability: The floor below which you are no longer a credible commercial actor. This concept is about the market-demand floor; MCV is about the supply-side floor.