# The Only SaaS Moats Left in 2026

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpILHX2D-AA
Duration: 40 min
Language: English
Words: 7674
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/KpILHX2D-AA

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[0:00] How the do you survive, if you're a SaaS company, how do you survive in this age of AI? AI is more of a problem probably for every SaaS founder in this room than you think. You don't I can start one today and probably have pretty close feature parity in a few months. They don't need your 50 features, they

[0:14] only need the three that they use. [music] If you don't agentify your software, build some type of agent on top of it, I think you're going to zero in the next couple years. Cuz someone's going to come along and they're going to ClickFunnels is terrible software, I hate using it, but I don't care because

[0:28] my accountant uses it and he likes it. But probably you're probably lucky. Probably doing pretty well if you have one or two of these. I am going to try to scare you a little bit with this talk. Um this is the I think I have 91 slides, 92 slides. It is by far the densest talk I've ever given.

[0:41] This one has a lot of gravity to it. You'll notice it's also the I think the only talk I've ever written co-written with someone. So it says by Rob Walling and Interval Set because Interval Set spent about a month wrestling with 89 different um papers written by uh think tanks, private equity groups, Gartner, mashing them with Claude attached to GPT, going back and forth, trying to figure out how the do you survive, if you're a SaaS company, how do you survive in this age of AI? Because what SaaS-pocalypse tells us tells us on social media is all SaaS is going to zero, okay? So we can say, "Well, that's

[1:15] not true. That's It's just not true. It's objectively not true." But is it going to go back to normal? Are we okay? Should we ignore it? That's not true either, right? So there's something in the middle and that's what we're trying to find um with this. So where we're going today, normally I have

[1:29] three acts, but uh today I have four. I want to try to get you a little scared. AI is more of a problem probably for every SaaS founder in this room than you think. I don't want to scare you too much, but just enough to pay attention. I'm going to talk about classic SaaS modes, what I mentioned in um SaaS Playbook, if you've read that. I have a few modes. And how

[1:49] some of those are dying or have died. Then talk about what we think are the modes that still work. And then I have like three or four slides that is really could be a whole 4-hour workshop on how do you evaluate your SaaS company? What questions do you ask? I tack it on at the end because it's important, but can't possibly cover

[2:09] that in a 45-minute talk. So, this is a sentiment that we're hearing on the internet. MicroConf Tiny Seed, I'm a founder, SaaS founder. AI is amazing. I'm shipping so much faster, and obviously, my customers are hair stylists or lawn care specialists. They're never going to vibe code my product. Okay? So, that is an attack. That's one attack that AI can make against you is someone your customer specifically vibe codes

[2:39] your product. So, I'm going to now show you 10 attacks, nine additional ones, several of which you probably haven't thought of. They're grouped into two buckets, the supply side and the demand side. Okay? So, basic economics, [snorts] if we have a widget and suddenly the supply of widgets goes way up, the price of widgets go down, commodity they get commoditized. You lose as a company, you lose as a founder, right? Well, SaaS can be the same thing. Imagine you have a single SaaS application that does scheduling

[3:14] links, and suddenly there are 99 others. There's a huge supply, becomes very messy. So, when the supply gets shocked, that's a problem. [music] On the other side, demand is well, these are my customers, right? People buying. Well, what if I have a million potential customers in the US and their businesses, and let's say 90%

[3:32] of them go out of business tomorrow. Suddenly, my demand plummets. This is bad. Both of these are bad. So, I'm going to cover 10 across supply and demand. I'm going to break them into those buckets. The supply shock has six different vectors that AI can come after you with. The thing to remember is AI everyone gets AI, not just you, and not just your

[3:53] customers. Everyone [music] gets AI. So, the first attack is the one we all think about. Your customer builds it, right? Some people say, "My app's pretty complicated. It has 50 different features." You're going to get the slides at the end, by the way, but um 50 different features, they're never going to vibe code it. One thing to think about is they don't need your 50 features, they only need

[4:17] the three that they use. All right? Second attack is competitors. Reaching parity very quickly. This slide shows eight of the 46 different AI note takers that I could find on the internet. And it's What is it? Otter, Fireflies, Krisp, Fathom, TLDR, Read AI, Circle Back, Granola. And I wanted to show them in this order because, you know, you think about your Otter in 2016 and you're like, "Ah, I got this all to myself. This is amazing." And now we have Granola and everyone in between who almost They almost all have feature parity. They're kind of the same product. And I know that would piss off the founders if they

[4:59] were here, but you don't I could start one today and probably have pretty close feature parity in a few months. That's a great for an upstart and it's really bad for your supply. It's a supply shock that everyone can get to feature parity with most apps these days. It buys you Features used to buy you a lot of time,

[5:17] they buy you a lot less time. So, attack number one was customers, attack number two, competitors. Attack number three, it's open source. I have already seen this. There are more open source projects, there are more open source projects working uh moving faster than they used to because I'm coding, everybody gets AI. They're moving faster and non-technical buyers who used to stay away from open source, they can deploy it cuz they talk to Claude or Claude code and they can run

[5:44] open source. None of these causes SaaS-pocalypse. 10 of them together makes a difference. Okay? My estimate, and this is just me doing this for 20 years and taking a guess. I've said this multiple times. I think somewhere SaaS-pocalypse says everything's going to zero and everyone's plateauing. That's not happening. That's not true. Um I think somewhere between 10 and 20% of all SaaS companies in the world are either

[6:12] going to decline or go to zero. That's a lot. It's a lot and it's not. I mean, that does that include it like little indie hacker projects? Probably. That's still a lot, right? One 10%? 20%? That gives you an idea. Attack number four is a platform, like a system of record that you're tied into, ships your feature for free because they can build it in a week, [music] a month. They can build it a lot faster. They already have the customers. You've basically given them a spec through your UI. They could feasibly, if you're an add-on to something, they could go out. I mean, imagine if you're um

[6:48] well, anything that ties into a CRM, isn't Salesforce and HubSpot and Close and any other CRMs just going to start building all the ancillary things cuz they're just easier to build now. So, your platform, this is like an integration partner that's going to come for you, I [music] think. [snorts] Attack number five, we're seeing this. Custom software at

[7:08] SaaS prices, approximately. If you're an agency, you used to charge 30 grand, 50 grand for a build cuz it took 3 months, now you can vibe code it, you can code it with AI assistants in a third, a fourth, a fifth of the time. And you always want to Agencies want recurring revenue. So, if I'm charging 99 bucks a month for mine, my one-size-fits-all, agency charges, whether it's 299, 499, 999, whatever it is, completely custom, made for you, supported for you. This model is becoming a thing. In fact, if I were like in my early 20s, I would think about [music] something like this. This is really

[7:46] interesting business model. It's still an attack on SaaS. And the sixth supply side is that if the model absorbs your product. This may or may not happen. But you remember when we used to pay apps to generate like ad copy and headlines and images and all that stuff. Um those apps went away. And there's a bunch of examples of others that have as

[8:08] well. All right. So that's the supply. Demand shock. There are four of these.

[8:19] This the demand shock I find and when Anna started to bring these to me, I was like, oh, I hadn't thought of I hadn't thought of that. I hadn't thought of that. And most SaaS founders the founders that I've talked to as I've been writing this talk are like, I didn't even think about that. What if your customers just go out of business? 50%, 90%, whatever the number

[8:36] is. Huge swaths that AI wipes them out. So imagine that your SaaS serves translation agencies or transcription agencies that used to have a human sitting there listening to something. The number of words translated and transcribed since AI have gone through the roof. Right? There's a lot more volume of this happening. The revenue of these agencies is effectively going to zero because we are basically using AI. Now, one can argue there's going to stay some boutique agencies. If you're doing medical transcription, I'm sure if you're or translation, you know, there's certain

[9:11] areas where this is critical. But this ecosystem is going to take a big hit. I mean, I say 10 to 20% of SaaS is going to experience a problem. 80%, 90% of these agencies are are going to zero. There's big disruptions in copywriting as well. There's a lot of things. Um so while the activity grows, your customer's ability to pay you plummets. If your customer start going out of business, there's no recovery from that, right? In terms of that's

[9:35] just involuntary churn. Attack number eight. Are your seats going away? This one we've heard. Remember when SaaS Apocalypse came up and they're like, "Seats are going away cuz agents are going to do everything." Yes and no. In some businesses, seats are going to have a problem. Because if you are Zendesk and you are customer service or customer support software, I think when Derek and I left Drip, we had six or eight customer support and we had six customer success. Now, so that we had that's about 12 people. Customer success these

[10:10] days still can't is not a gentle yet. Customer support is 80-90% automated in a lot of things. So suddenly you have go from eight agents to maybe one or two that is supervising a bunch of Yes, eight human agents down to one or two AI agents and they're just supervising them, right? So you have massive

[10:32] contraction of seats. And you'll see you see Zendesk and Help Scout and these folks moving towards outcome base. There's a bunch of things they're doing with pricing to try to get around this. It's still a big shock. Attack number nine of 10. Does the thing you manage still matter? Are people using it at all?

[10:53] Or does it just go away because of AI? [music] Whether it's agents Imagine that you were software to manage take-home coding tests. We We don't do those anymore. Right? The whole category of software managing take-home code cuz if you give someone a take-home coding test, what do they do? Well, they're going to use AI for it, which but you want them to use AI. But how much do they do versus how much did the AI do? So Derek and I were just talking You were mentioned like six times in my talk, I guess. Um you and I were just talking on the podcast a couple weeks ago talking about hiring

[11:21] and it's like, "Well, we do pair programming now." That's what I would do, right? You're not going to I'm not going to do a take-home coding take-home coding test. So some people in this room impacted by it, others not. Still an [music] attack. The 10th and final one is it's related to seats, but it's

[11:37] different. [music] Imagine if you were software for receptionists, okay? Or like um [music] almost like call centers where they are going to be replaced by AI agents. So, you have a bunch of seats, there's a bunch of humans, and now if you and you have software you're selling for $50 a month, if you don't agentify your software, build some type of agent on top of it, I think you're going to zero in the next couple years. Cuz someone's going to come along and they're going to say, "Yeah, you want that software plus like a fully autonomous, let's say 90% accurate agent for $300, $500 a month

[12:14] when you're paying 50 bucks a month, but you can let the receptionist go or the call center people?" They're going to pay the three to 500 bucks or whatever that is. So, is the human even using your software anymore? Related to seats, but it's different. So, that's the part that gets you scared. To make you think, you know, I need to pay attention cuz even if your business is doing okay today and you're bootstrapping and you just want to run it forever, some of this stuff's coming for you now and some of it's coming for us over the next few years. All right. So, we're going to talk about some

[12:45] uh I'm going to zip through this part. This is like classic moats that I've thought about that we we've talked about in SaaS traditionally, why customers used to stick around. I came up with nine reasons. I I saw this slide this morning and I realized I had was probably eight, but whatever, it doesn't really matter. So, used to be I have unique features, they're not going to leave because they need these features. I have a real strong brand, they're going to stick with me for or

[13:05] could continue to buy from me for. Uh I have these owned traffic channels, I have SEO that I've been doing for years, um clever code, complex algorithms, 5-years of honing, refining, working around buggy APIs, whatever else. The team is familiar with my UX, they don't want to retrain people, so there's no not going to switch. I have a I have 30 integrations. Man,

[13:28] those are complex to build, aren't they? High switching costs of just it's hard to get my data out. I don't really know it can't really export and then configuring in the new workflow thing on the other place is a pain in the butt. Um if multiple people are in my app coordinating, similar to retraining, it's like everyone has to move at once and when we cut over on this day and then I'm a system of record where all this data comes in and it's it's complicated to move, right? These are nine reasons I came up with. There are

[13:54] probably more. And and we're just going to check a few of these off, shall we? So, what does AI do? AI makes building features doesn't bring it to zero. I don't want to act through this talk like suddenly I can build a year's worth of software in a week. That's not true. But it dramatically reduces the the moat or the barrier to just rolling out new features that competitors have. Feature parity, I think products are going to all kind of converge cuz whoever's really good at product and UX, people are just going to wind up copying them with AI. [music]

[14:23] Own traffic channels. This one I'm 50/50 on. Yeah, if you have really good SEO, it's fine. Is is AI making marketing and just like it's making kind of starting to trivialize code, is it starting to make marketing really muddy? It is. Clever code, I think we can just admit that someone can probably now that AI is solving a hundred math

[14:46] proofs. Did anyone hear about this? There's like a hundred math proofs that haven't been solved ever in human history and they're saying inside it was Anthropic or Gemini or somebody. They just solved a hundred of them. And NR and I were talking, I was like, well, glad I'm not getting my PhD in math. It's like, what do you do anymore,

[14:59] right? AI's doing it. UX familiarity. Yes, if it's still humans. If things go agentic, your UX doesn't matter at all. Integrations, isn't isn't the API really just the spec to hand to to my my bot now to code the thing? Uh no, I'm getting depressed. All right, and high switching costs used to be a thing. They still are a little bit, but man, have you Have you seen someone point an AI at an app and say, "Pull out all my data, even when there's no export?" It Yeah, it really can and does happen. So, um of these nine, I think three are still

[15:34] like system of record is a real thing. You're going to see it in this list here. Coordination between people is a thing and and a brand plus some stuff is a thing. So, we have these three. I'm going to add five more and we're going to dig into those now. This is the meaty, meaty part of the talk. So, for each of these, hey, real quick, if you're getting value out of this talk, you should subscribe to the MicroConf YouTube channel. We're posting all the talks from MicroConf Europe. So, even if you couldn't make it to Iceland, you can still get a lot of the learnings from

[16:02] the event. We also have a back catalog of some amazing talks from our previous events. All right, let's dive back in. I'm going to talk about the I'm going to say what the mode is. I'm going to give at least two examples for each one. And that's [clears throat] the real That's probably the important part of the talk. Um I tried to give a big-name example we all know and tried to do a smaller like MicroConf tiny seed company just because I don't want to just give a hey, hey, you should be Slack, Facebook, and Google. Like this is not helpful, right? So, I tried to do a big one, a

[16:32] small one, and then there's a question at the end to help you almost evaluate your own um product in the context of this. Something I didn't say at the beginning is that the M&A market One of the reasons A&R So, A&R came at this problem from private equity and the M&A market because a big part of what makes the whole SaaS ecosystem work and so valuable is the private equity, which does 70% of the acquisitions of our types of SaaS companies, they have been paying incredible multiples for the past six, eight years, maybe a little

[17:08] longer. And they follow public markets. So, as HubSpot or Atlassian move, so does private equity and these multiples change. Even if you never plan to sell, this ecosystem works because a lot of money has been flowing into it. If you don't have any of these moats, what A&R has been seeing at Discretion Capital, right? He runs a sell-side M&A

[17:29] advisory for two to $20 house companies. What they've seen is that private equity and strategic buyers as well are are really scared, not about the present, but they don't know if you're going to be around in a year, three, five years. So, he came out at as what can you have in your business that gives them confidence that you're going to be around in three to five years such that they will pay our old multiples

[17:51] that we've talked about all this time. I come at it from more of the founder side. He comes at it from kind of the finance private equity side, and that's why these moats are important. Even if you never plan to sell, even if you're bootstrapped, the these are defensive uh uh defenses against AI. And the other interesting thing, I had a couple slides I pulled out, and it's about Atlassian and HubSpot within a day of each other in August, about five weeks ago, they

[18:17] reported their earnings. And HubSpot beat earnings, beat almost every expectation, did a billion-dollar stock buyback, and their stock dropped 21%, and Atlassian had similar results, but they their MCP server had like doubled in use, it had a bunch of like AI was making it better, they went up 35%. It was a huge swing. Like, imagine, you know, tens of billions of dollars moving around. And when we look at it, it's like, well, Atlassian and Jira specifically has several of these moats, and HubSpot's inbound marketing engine is probably going to I won't say wiped out, is massively negative negatively impacted by AI. So, we're already seeing it in public markets, we're seeing it in

[19:01] private equity and acquisition markets, and obviously we are seeing or going to see it in the bootstrapped markets as well. Let's dive into the moats. The first one is that buyers know and trust you. I've tried to summarize each of these um with this phrasing, but then there's bullets. It's like, "Well, what does that mean, right?" It's It's a strong brand and also you know how your buyers you know your

[19:27] buyers and you know how they buy. You have partners potentially that have built their businesses around recommending you. And you have a champion inside a company that will fight for you. So, the true like strongest form of this moat is when a competitor who came in with better software, who can vibe code it, still has to build all of this. All

[19:49] right? A lot of these moats, actually all of them, they're not on or off. It's not a bit. Maybe it's a zero to 10, right? A zero to 100. And you could say, "Well, Salesforce or Shopify are are at 90 out of this, you know?" And you can say, "Well, maybe I'm at 10 now. How do I get

[20:07] to 20 or 30?" Examples of this. Strong brand, buyers rec you know the buyers, partners uh recommend you. QuickBooks is a perfect example of this. Huge ecosystem. We We could replicate QuickBooks tomorrow and we would be fighting against the accountants. Like every accountant I've ever QuickBooks is terrible software. I hate using it, but I don't care because

[20:31] my accountant uses it and he likes it. And a better product doesn't get you in this conversation. We've seen I mean, Xero's doing okay, but what is Xero 10, 12 years into this? Shopify is another example. Their partner network is extensive. There's a bajillion agents I think literally thousands of agencies that implement Shopify stores. So, yeah, hey, there it is on the slide. It must be true. So, when a merchant if you go to a merchant goes to hire an agency and says, "What cart should I use?" Well, they're like, "Well, obviously we're going to do Shopify, right?" The platform's already

[21:00] decided. The moat, two questions I'm sorry, right, moat, two examples and now we have the question, which is who's built their business or their career around recommending or defending you? That's one way to evaluate this. Moat number two, you are a system of record. What does that mean? It's a source of truth within a business for

[21:24] data. This is where daily operations are built around you. It means people are logging in every day to do stuff. You're You might be the operating system of that business. That if you go down, the business is like out of luck. They can barely do stuff. There are systems of record that aren't just the operating

[21:42] system. If they have a a a source of data that can't be easily exported and that everyone's working in all the time. But I think like the biggest moat here is daily operations are built around you. You have balances, you have approvals, you have statuses, you have all types of stuff, workflows living. Roles and rules are configured and a lot of other systems are wired in either reading from it to act or pumping data

[22:08] into you and that data doesn't come out. Jira is a good example of this. Right? We think of it as just an issue tracker, but there is so much. I mean, devs and managers and product people, you have multiple teams in Jira. And you could export your tickets in an afternoon, but migrating all the history, the audit trail, the integrations, and getting all those teams to move to a different system would be very, very painful. So, there is the the fact that it is a system of record just has gravity. It has weight

[22:41] and it pulls keeps you there. [snorts] Uh Gymdesk is a tiny seed company. He had an amazing, amazing, life-changing exit. And it's basically imagine your gym, martial arts store, dojo, yoga studio, your entire business runs on him. And it started as I I don't remember. It was like a a part of the gym. And And suddenly he's like integrating with hardware so people can use like a fob to get in the door. And every aspect of this gym it just boop boop boop. Invoicing and billing and just kept spreading. And so now if you're a gym, you get gym desk,

[23:11] done. No one very few are going to switch off this for any type of AI. So the question is if your customer wants to leave, what can't they export? What breaks downstream and what would you what would they have to rebuild? Mote number three, this is where it starts to get esoteric where Aida showed me these and I was like, "What do these mean?" And I had to

[23:33] spend hours like thinking through. [gasps] You're allowed to act. What does that mean? So if you're a tool that recommends that a clerk makes a payment, you're one type of tool versus a tool that can make the payment, that can actually move money. So do you give them a spreadsheet with a list of of PayPal emails and dollars? Okay, so you're like a report, you're an analysis, you're

[24:00] reporting tool. Or do you actually move the money? If you can move the money, then you act. Examples of this, Stripe Connect. Doesn't No one's switching off Stripe Connect. Doesn't just recommend a payment, it actually moves money. Tiny seed company, Reimbi. It reimburses. If I wanted to pull a job candidate in, uh fly him out, and they have expenses, meals, hotel, other stuff, I don't want to set him up as a vendor in my system. I want to pay him via Venmo, PayPal, Cash App. Reimbi does the whole thing soup to nuts. The fact that Reimbi can act means that it has

[24:37] [music] a pretty nice mote here. You don't have to be Stripe to have the authority to pay. And I threw a third one in here, Churnkey. Um which is if you're a SaaS company, you can put Churnkey in and they have offers when people go to churn. And they they help they offer discounts, and they offer all kinds of [music] um different variations to try to reduce

[25:01] your churn. And there's a lot of tools that will tell you who's about to churn, but churn key is literally allowed to get in the cancellation flow and make an offer. They're allowed to act, they're allowed to step in front of your customers, [music] and you don't uh you don't even check on them. So, question here is, can you act? Can your software act, or can it only advise? Are you a reporting tool, or

[25:20] something that actually does something? Vote number four is that This is another one when he said it I I was like, "What are you talking about?" They don't check your work. This The best example of this is Gusto. I've used Gusto for 10 years at least. No, no, since 2013 probably. 13 years. And I've never once checked their work. They report [clears throat] I could go to jail for IRS something or other if Gusto decided to me, cuz I have never once looked at anything but the

[25:52] W-2 they issued to me. You just don't. And it's We can say, "Well, is this complicated? Like, why don't I?" Well, I don't know, I don't understand it. Great. So, am I going to switch when someone AI vibe codes a Gusto competitor? I'm not, cuz these guys got it dialed. [snorts] Another example, this is Avalara, also a

[26:10] tax. This is sales tax, though. Um once again, we don't check the number. This was one I had I struggled to find uh like a small like a tiny feet micro comp example of this. So, I have two big ones. And it's not just they were trustworthy, they've earned this permission, right? They've been right for years and years

[26:28] and years. So, if you were to like I said, vibe code [music] um Gusto or Avalara, switching is not likely. All right. We're in the home stretch here. The fifth one Oh, yeah, this is the one we added the other day, [laughter] cuz it had gotten lumped in Man, you do this long enough and you they start

[26:51] lumping in. At one point we had 10 and then realized, yeah, you can imagine this how this goes trying to build something like this from nothing. So, this one is that someone official already said yes, and what I mean by that is this is where you there regulations, licenses, accreditations, certifications, right? Anything where there's a third-party board or body that is monitoring these things and that you as the vendor have

[27:15] to qualify, get certified, etc., etc. Just cuz your customer I guess I have a bullet here, but just cuz your customers do it, um Yeah, yeah. Serving regulated customers isn't the same as holding an approval yourself. And cuz the competitor can clone your code. Again, every one of these is like, all right, if if cloning the code, let's just assume it gets faster and faster, easier and easier, and it goes to zero much like hard drive space did, internet speeds, bandwidth, all that, right? It it just approached zero. Didn't get to zero, but it approached zero. Let's assume, for the

[27:46] sake of argument, code approaches zero. What else are these moats doing for us? And, [music] um this is where you have to get This is This can be the ISO 27001. It can be, um uh I'm going to say GDPR. That's not what I mean. What is a SOC 2 is what I'm thinking of, but it can all And And these are these are just little road bump little speed bumps in the road, um but it can also be things like um Well, I'll get to it in a second, I guess. HIPAA is another one. So, compliance is such so brutal that Vanta is literally a billion-dollar company

[28:21] and they just spring up over the past I mean, they haven't been around for more than 5 or 6 years. Because these things are tough and they are, um they take a while, they're expensive. An example of a tiny seed company that works with this and if you were to try to vibe code this exact same thing, it would be very hard because, um no one in here knows what ABA is except for the founder. Um I forget what it is, but it's it's like a uh a element of psychology and it's it's related to that, but they have courses

[28:56] that count towards credentials. And if you try to vibe code this, you have to get board approval. And are any of us going to go through that? No. So, she has a moat around her business. Another example of this is one that I just thought of in the last couple days. Sending text in the US is shockingly difficult [music] and the laws are way worse than email. We thought we had it bad with Drip. When I deal with the text SMS companies and Tiny Seed, I'm like, "Good lord, I

[29:24] would never start a business in that." Well, that's that's a moat right there, right? So, you have to There's carrier registration, there's consent laws, there's all types of ways. It is very cumbersome. The software for this is not that hard to code, but dealing with texting is not fun. So, [music] that is a bit, you know, is it 100% no one's ever going to do it? No, but it is going to be a barrier. So, question here is what approval, complexity, what legal stuff do you know have you navigated

[29:50] that a competitor would have to earn? Number six is that everyone's already in the software. This is the idea of network effect. Who has to move if they leave your software? Is it one person? Well, they can switch in an afternoon, right? You have a whole team? All right, everyone agrees we move next week. It's a whole community or a whole

[30:14] company all at once. It's painful. So, the more folks that are in there coordinating, the bigger the moat. Obviously, prototypical example of this is Slack. Some of us love it, some of us hate it. We all try to move off of it. No one does. There's competitors to Slack. We can't name them because Slack is the king. But, you don't have to be Slack. Commit Swimming is a Tiny Seed company and swim team management built for coaches. But what they do is and a lot of the swim There is adult swim teams, but imagine there's a bunch of kids swim teams and they get all the parents

[30:52] in signed up for it and it's notifications, right? Hey, here's the meet, here's the location, we're all doing this, pizza party, blah blah blah. Every family's all signed up. These are all non-technical folks generally. So switching doesn't just mean a move the software, it's like everybody has to move all at once and the whole league has to agree like it's a pain in the ass, right? So the question here, this is a pretty This one's very interesting

[31:15] and obviously hard to achieve. Um would a competitor have to move everyone at once is the question. Number seven of eight. Every customer that you have makes your software smarter. You're going to hear me talk and use the phrase learning loop. Anurag's going to be talking about learning loops in a couple hours. Example of this is Stripe Radar,

[31:40] which identifies fraud. [music] And every merchant that Stripe has sees fraud patterns and that feeds up into a borg-like mind that protects all the other merchants. So if you were to try to go start your own Stripe Radar with just your data, it's worth way way way way way less than Stripe Radar. And their system gets smarter. No single merchant could ever build it, right? And

[32:02] if you leave that, you lose it. The diagram here is a situation comes up uh human or software takes an action. You see what the result is and then you correct and make it better. If you have a lot of data, doesn't matter. You have to be able to use that data to predict across all your customers because that then becomes the moat because switching means you lose it. Another example of

[32:27] this is Ramp, which is bookkeeping. Um [music] and every correction that one of their customers makes to a you know, Verizon line item, oh I'm going to do that as a cell phone whatever. Well, everybody else gets that, too, right? That's a trivial example, but you get the idea. And then, churn key, again, every cancellation, in theory, should make their engine better. I don't actually I didn't have a chance to contact the churn key guys. I don't know if they're actually doing that, if they're doing a feedback loop, but you can bet that I'll be contacting them after this talk and say, "Build that in,

[32:59] cuz you should have this moat." So, this one only counts if you have clear three gates. Number one, every customer makes it better for every other. Can't just be siloed that this customer makes it better for themselves, cuz then they can go build it or a competitor can build it. Number two, customers can take their data,

[33:18] but not what you learn from it. Yeah, they can export it, but they don't know what you learn. And the last one is, you keep you have to keep learning, right? Cuz if the if it's stagnant and you don't get better over time, then it it doesn't matter. They can just leave. Another example I thought about this is a Mailchimp. They They're Mailchimp's the only ESP that ever made freemium work, because the biggest thing in in email is spam, and they built an engine called Omnivore, that figured out how to detect spam at a level at a machine learning level. This is in '09, like way

[33:52] before any of this AI came out. Um they're another good example. So, your question is, does what happens to one customer make your product smarter for the rest? And the last one that I added just a couple days ago based on this Peter Levels tweet. It's hard to keep running. So, Peter Levels tweets, "I've tried for weeks now." He's the Peter Levels, Indie Hacker, half a million followers on Twitter. He's just vibe coding everything. I mean, even like $20, stuff he wants to like vibe code and host it himself, cuz that's what Peter does. So,

[34:21] he's at the extreme end of that. He's trying to vibe code everything. So, he tried to do ScrapingBee, um which is a it it's a proxy It's tiny seed company proxy service that um helps you not get blocked as you try to scrape things, right? Because everybody blocks your IPs. Tried to code it, tried to code it. Finally, he's like, "Fuck it. I'm just going to pay him 99 bucks a month." So, if you look at his list of He said, "These are the only things I'm paying for now. It's CloudFlare, like raw server bare metal server boxes and VPS and blah blah blah and

[34:50] ScrapingBee." And it's like, "What a trip." These massive companies are ScrapingBee. Well, why is that? Well, it's because web scraping isn't that hard to build, but to keep it working and not get blocked is a pain in the ass. It's a bunch of devops. It's servers. It's cycling IPs. It's a huge headache to run. It's a burden. ScrapingBee guys

[35:07] sold. They had a great exit. Eight-figure cash exit. They've They've been public about. Um but they didn't want to run it anymore. It was such a pain in the ass, but that was their moat. CloudFlare. Same exact thing, right? Are you going to vibe code CloudFlare? If someone else vibe codes CloudFlare, am I

[35:21] going to switch? No. It's a crazy moat. It's just hard to run. Drip. God rest our souls. They're a primer that we survived to this. Drip was Anyone can send an email. And this is why when I see people I've seen someone like vibe code kind of an ESP, right? And say, "Just plug in your Amazon SES and you can send your own email." And and yep, Benedict, you as well. We just kind of twirl cuz it's like, "No, no, no, you don't understand. We had multiple full-time people. All they did was try to fight spam." You hook hook it into your SES account. Like, it's a

[35:54] problem, right? So, um these are moats. Question here is, is it hard to build or is it hard to keep running? Cuz that thing that you hate and resent can actually um can actually be a moat. These are the eight. And now I'm going to wrap up with just a couple slides. It These are more of a thought experiment that we're I mean, we're going to be fleshing this next part out into hours and hours of stuff. So, it's it's going to be quick. But the I want to answer the question quickly like

[36:23] which of these are possible for you? And there's eight questions. Each one corresponds to a moat. There's probably two, three, four questions we could ask for each of these, right? So, it's like, who has built you heard some of these. Who's built their career business around recommending you? Do you hold the definitive view of the work, right? Are Are you a record of the work? Are you system of record? Are you just a view of

[36:45] it? Do you take action or do you just recommend it? Do customers trust your output enough that they don't check you? What approval This is the regulation one, right? What approvals regulations do you hold that a newcomer has to wait for? Who has to agree to replace you? Does one customer's experience make it

[37:04] better for everyone? And what do you maintain that you resent maintaining? That's my favorite. And I think this is the last slide. It is These are just examples that I was like for each of the moats, how would I go from where I am today to try to have that moat? So, if I was And these are the in the same order as well. So, it's like, if I had a vertical tool I I want to build an ecosystem. I want the vendor I want to become the one that the industry recommends, right? If I'm a point solution, can I become a system of record? If I'm a reporting tool that

[37:41] gives reports, can I figure out how to act and actually move the money or actually, you know, put the churn thing, not just recommend it. If I have something that calculates something, how do I get to be the output that nobody double checks? If I'm in a regulated industry, how do I become an approved or the approved provider? We see Don't we see anthropic and and all the AI providers trying to basically regulate their industry so that they pull the

[38:06] ladder up behind them? If I'm a single seat tool can I build that network effects that's at everyone's coordinating? If I collect data, can I build a learning loop? And if I have infrastructure that I babysit and I despise and hate will that be a burden that no one else will carry? So, in conclusion, try to figure out which ones are yours or which ones you can move into. Maybe you have one of these today. You probably you're probably lucky. You're probably doing pretty well if you have

[38:33] one or two of these, I think. So, if you figure out which ones are yours or you move towards them, you're worth more, business is more um defensible. [music] And as I said, this talk was about moats, about defense. And we're going to hear from A&R in a couple hours [music] um about how to go on offense. So, that's it for me for today. We have

[38:52] time for questions. Thanks for watching. There was a lot in that talk, so we turned it into a free field guide, the 10 attacks, the eight moats, and [music] a scorecard you can fill out for your own business. Head to microconf.com/moats and we'll send you the guide. You'll also get the recording of the Q&A from after the talk. We're not posting that one on YouTube, so this is the only place to get it. And if you want to be in the room next time, in 2027, MicroConf is headed to Austin, Texas in April and to Dubrovnik, Croatia in October. [music] Watching these talks on YouTube is great, but the real magic

[39:26] happens in person. You're in a room with about 250 founders who get exactly what you're building, and some of the best conversations happen in the hallway between the talks. The last seven, maybe eight MicroConfs has sold out, so grab your tickets now at microconf.com/events if you want to go. These events will sell out, and I hope to see you there. And if you already have your ticket or you're just ready for another great

[39:46] talk, check out this one right here. I'll see you over there.

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