What is the real moat for a product in the age of AI?
Building a product today guarantees nothing. A year ago, shipping something functional was enough to stand out. Today anyone can vibe code an MVP in a weekend. The barrier to building has collapsed which means the barrier to being copied has collapsed alongside it.
So if the product itself is no longer the moat, what is?
Based on my opinion: network effects become a more interesting moat in the AI era. You can't vibe-code your way to 3 billion WhatsApp users. You can't replicate a payment network by writing better software. The value is the network itself, the accumulated relationships, the flows of value between users.
A simple example:
Airbnb: you can rebuild the feature set with AI tools in weeks, but you cannot replicate the trust network between 4M+ hosts and hundreds of millions of guests built over 15 years.
So I'm curious:
Are you actively trying to build a network effect or community moat around your product?
Or do you think there are other defensible moats AI can't easily replicate?
And if you've already seen competitors copy your product, what's the one thing they couldn't take?
Replies
network effects are real but i'd add distribution and trust as separate moats that AI also can't replicate. for most indie products you're never getting to WhatsApp scale, so the actual question is what's the next tier down. i think it's who you are and what you've said publicly over time. if i've been writing honestly about a specific problem for a year, a competitor who ships the same feature tomorrow still starts at zero credibility with the audience i've built. the thing they couldn't take is the relationship. for RawReply specifically i'm not betting on network effects yet, i'm betting on being the person who cares most visibly about this one problem.
Strong framing. I would add one moat that sits next to network effects: trust that compounds over time.
If your product touches something high stakes, money, someone's inbox, their customers, then the real barrier is not the feature set. Anyone can copy the feature. The barrier is whether users trust you with the thing that hurts if it goes wrong.
I am building in the email space, and the moment users hand you their inbox, the game changes. A competitor can rebuild every button in a weekend. What they cannot rebuild in a weekend is the record of never having auto-sent something the user did not approve. That trust is earned one careful decision at a time, and it does not transfer.
So my answer to your question: I am not chasing a network effect. I am chasing the kind of reliability that makes switching feel risky. Feature parity is cheap now. Being the product a user is scared to replace is not.
Curious if others here think trust counts as a real moat or just a slower version of the same copy problem.
WebCurate.co
I think distribution is one of the biggest moats now.
Anyone can build a product much faster than before, but getting users, earning trust, and building a brand still takes a long time. Those are much harder to copy than the product itself.
Nothing beats building a network or a community that supports you and, more importantly, trusts you.