AI is hollowing out demand for indie digital products, stranding founders without a viable business model

Summary

An indie operator running a 5-year digital-product store watched gross revenue collapse 76% in a single year (€51.6k to €12.2k, verified via Stripe) — not because traffic disappeared, but because AI tools (e.g., Suno) now let buyers generate for free what they used to pay for. People still show up to the store; they just don't check out. This signals a brutal, under-appreciated threat: the 'layer underneath' successful creators — the indie entrepreneurs selling tools, templates, sample packs, and assets to aspiring creators — is being hollowed out first, and there is no playbook, tooling, or pivot strategy to help them survive. Because incumbents and AI vendors have no incentive to solve this, and no one is building defensible monetization or differentiation tooling for AI-disrupted indie niches, it is a high-pain, high-value, unsolved problem with enormous commercial stakes.