When capital barriers are low and you are able to build a product which solves a problem 10x better than the competition within a specific niche, it comes as quite a shock when you cannot even find a single user willing to try your product for free. A product which is low capital to build can be very high capital to sell because you need an enormous marketing budget to even get one real user to try your product long enough to realize that it's 10x more efficient than what they're using now. Then there might be a ton of additional regulatory barriers standing in the way of a sale (esp. B2B). Massive chicken and egg problem. These kinds of situations where sale becomes a total bottleneck and stands in the way of delivering economic efficiency can make one feel that the economic pie must be shrinking fast.