Moat finder

Moat Finder

When anyone can rebuild your features in a weekend with ai, the features stopped being your moat, but most founders are still defending them. This skill finds what is actually hard to copy about your business and tells you where to spend.

When to use

• You got cloned, or you are afraid of it.
• A competitor shipped something that looks like yours.
• You are deciding what to work on next and want it to be the defensible thing, not the copyable thing.

Inputs

Bring what you can. The audit works even if some are thin:

• what the product does, and who it is for,
• current traction (users, revenue, audience size, anything real),
• how you get users today,
• anything you have that a stranger starting today would not: data, a community, a reputation, a distribution channel, a partnership.

Process

1. Split the two layers. Sort everything about your business into the clonable surface (ui, features, generic content, tech stack) and the defensible layer (the eight axes in references/moat-map.md: audience, trust and reputation, proprietary data and feedback loops, owned distribution, community, switching costs, brand, and speed of learning). Be honest that the surface is now cheap.
2. Score where you actually stand on each defensible axis, 0-3, with a one-line reason. Most founders are near zero on most axes and do not realize it. That is the point of the exercise, not a failure.
3. Find the two or three you are closest to. Not the strongest in theory, the ones you could realistically build from where you are in the next month, given your actual traction.
4. Prescribe the 30-day moves. For each chosen axis, the smallest concrete actions that widen it. Specific and this-week, not "build a community." See the moves list in the reference.
5. Answer the question. Write the one-liner: if a perfect copy of your product launched tomorrow, what would still be yours. If the honest answer is "nothing yet," say so, because that is the most useful finding you can get.

Output

A short teardown:

• the clonable surface, named plainly,
• the defensible-layer scorecard (eight axes, 0-3 each, one line each),
• the two or three moats to build now, with 30-day moves for each,
• the one-line answer to the clone question.

Guardrails

• Be honest, not encouraging. A generous audit is useless. If the moat is thin, the value is saying so clearly and early.
• Prefer moves over theory. Every recommendation names an action you could take this week, who does it, and what changes after.
• Audience and trust are usually the answer, and usually the slowest. Do not let that push you toward a faster but weaker moat. Name the real one even when it takes months.
• No hype in the writeup. Lead with what is true about this specific business.

Related

Pairs with build-in-public-engine, which is often how the audience-and-trust moat actually gets built. The pain it answers is surfaced by founder-pain-miner whenever cloning threads recur.