Ask HN: What are some ways to build a powerful moat for your product?

1 points by blindprogrammer 1 year ago | 1 comment

Nowadays, software is slowly but surely becoming more of a commodity than a unique product that requires specific skill and expertise, thanks to AI. To address this new market where anyone can compete, what are some ways to build a powerful moat?

For example, any programmer with a basic understanding of web development can create a Twitter clone using Django, Flask, or Spring Boot. However, their moat isn't simply the technical skill involved; it's the millions of users who are familiar with the brand and use the app daily.

So, if you were trying to build a new software product and you want to have a powerful moat already built in at the outset, what would that be? The reason I'm not impressed by the AI hype nowadays is because 99% of these so-called apps have no moat; they're just waiting to be swallowed by OpenAI and similar companies.

conartist6 1 year ago |

What will happen instead is standards, because the fragmentation of these monopolies would instead leave people unable to communicate with each other.

People want to be able to communicate with each other! For example because people want to be able to communicate with each other, the EU made it law that messenger apps must embrace competitive compatibility.

Once you have standards a clone of a UI or even a backend is no more threat. People can customize clients and servers to no end at that point -- they can do anything but break the shared expectations.