[alexpham14]

Short answer: yes, but the “moat” has changed.

A lot of people still think moats are about features. They’re not anymore. Features are cheap now. Execution and distribution are the real bottlenecks.

Big companies can copy your product, but they usually won’t copy: – your speed early on – your willingness to serve a tiny, unsexy niche – your ability to change direction without internal politics

In practice, most startups don’t die because a big company copied them. They die because they never found real users who cared enough to pay.

The moat today often looks like: – deep understanding of a specific workflow or pain point – trust with a narrow audience – compounding advantages (data, habits, integrations, community)

If your plan is “build something cool and hope it sticks”, it’s probably not worth it. If your plan is “solve a painful problem for a very specific group, then expand”, it still is.

Curious how people here think about moats post-AI. Are we underestimating distribution, or overestimating defensibility?

[another_twist]

Zero to one makes this crystal clear. Most startups die because they didnt manage to sell not because they didnt manage to build the product. Secondly there was never a code moat. Code was always cheap. But architecture, distribution, quality control, integration once landed, this is where money is mostly made. Most indie or small companies die because they just pick shitty problems. eg nobody cares about a goddamn notes app, the one on Mac works fine and most people write garbage in their notes like utter trash. So obviously a notes app has little value because the asset it manages has very little value. Not so much if you are building something like document storage for regulated industries. Or compliance software. In these cases, its the business domain expertise which counts. Even when applying for jobs without domain expertise code monkeys never get paid past a threshold. People / entities that command a premium are the ones with domain knowledge.

[mraza007]

You nailed right Most startups die because they optimize too much and have no real users