The only moat left is money?

So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago.

He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable.

If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to compete against the tailors in your neighborhood, and you can easily find a neighborhood that doesn't have a tailor. If you're building a scalable product, you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room.

Everyone here has grown up in the birth of the internet -- a once in ever event -- where building something scalable was just there for the taking. That's never going to exist again basically.

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.

> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.

This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.

The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

This article sounds like "I can't make a profitable SaaS, hence others can't too, and those who can, are using absurd amount of money or prior reputation to do so"

I advice to grow up and do some proper research on what problem to solve, and how to build trust with audience before pushing your products.

I dont have much money or prior reputation when starting out, I blogged weekly, then slowly launched technical ebooks, one time utility app, and finally SaaS , took me about 6 years of showing up every day to have a job-replacing income.

Your other post mentioned you gave up and declared failure after 3 weeks of launching your SaaS, I think the timeframe expectation you had might be unrealistic.

In Republic I, Socrates distinguishes the art of medicine from the art of wage-earning. One is about the work; the other is about getting paid. Historically, the craft was the primary goal, and the money was an extrinsic side effect.

Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.

The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.

The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.

I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.

I appreciate the conversation the post initiates.

Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries.

If they could "re-produce" it with their capital, they would've preferred that.

Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable.

Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision? Ownership of a repo or leadership of that community?

All those are perceived moats (or risks) by these folks that tried to scoop him up.

Coding agents are good, but once the complexity is high they're not good enough. Eventually your agent won't be able to make changes to your code base without introducing bugs with every change. In my experience, the agents aren't very good with abstractions yet, and no amount of testing can completely paper over that problem. So yes, the industry is changing dramatically and at a breathtaking rate, but I don't think money is the only moat left.

The OP should read up on business strategy, probably starting with Porter's Five Forces.

Hint: Money is a nice thing to have but it is very definitely not a moat.

If a company is making above market returns and the only thing stopping a potential competitor from competing with them (aka the company's so-called "moat") is that "it takes money", that company does NOT have a moat.

It's very easy for a potential competitor to calculate that, after x-months or y-years, they will have made enough profits to pay for the cost of building the competing product. As long as that amount of time is finite, there is excess profit for a competitor to take, and the company will find it's so called "moat" wasn't a moat at all.

This isn't a new thing. It's been a fact for centuries or millenia. It's one of the many things that makes success in business hard.

Porter's Five Forces is one distillation of the foundational principles on which moats can be built (and yes, this is a non-trivial subject, so success in this area generally does take more effort than just reading or skimming the Wikipedia page, but if you had to distill it down to one sentence, it's probably "try to build something that has network effects").

I thought your blog sofware was interesting, and you have a blog on it from last year. The Git link on this page: https://elliotbonneville.com/building-a-blog-in-90-minutes/ however, is broken.

Broken Git link: https://github.com/elliotbonneville/elliotbonneville.com

Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard.

Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.

Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.

no one is willing to pay you for easy.

These types of takes are getting really tiring. The game isn't over, just the metagame.

I'm not saying I have the next metagame figured out, but AI doesn't magically solve all the worlds problems by existing. It likely even creates a new classes of problems. In such an environment there's going to be opportunity.

Are the software shops and devs who were winning at churning out SaaS products going to be the best suited to this new environment? Maybe not, but adaptation wins over non-adaptation, something that has always been the case.

> a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm

This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an notable or surprising result that building it resulted in little interest from general audiences.

The way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." If the answer is yes, then the business has no moat. The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.

Why are HN mods appending a question mark to the original title which is obviously a headline of a blog post, i.e. a thesis of the author, and not an assertion of fact? You may as well suffix every headline with a question mark.

There is an old word for it: saturation.

And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.

One thing I’ve noticed doing Show HNs recently:

People are flooded by new projects and assume (rightly) that most are low-signal, so they don’t engage. Because there’s low engagement, new projects get even less visibility. That reinforces the belief that nothing interesting can be built anymore.

I ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much.

The bottleneck isn’t building. it’s distribution and who already has an audience. Now dont get me started on getting an audience. thats a whole different pain.

The well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks.

The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.

This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn.

Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software.

Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money.

We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications.

Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation.

There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.

> The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.

It feels like that doesn't it? But, as one counter-point, OpenClaw. :)

Btw I did a deep-dive into AI moats last week and wrote a blog post about it. Relationships were most likely the strongest moat from my research - but definitely having a large amount of money in reserves helps. https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-a...

This is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users.

Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.

Maybe I just wasn't good at it.

That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.

Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.

Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.

Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.

I think the other moat is access to non-public data. If you can train, measure, or make decisions based on specific data that the vibecoder trying to clone you can't get, you can keep ahead.

> The value of human thinking is going down.

Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.

If someone has a problem they need solved:

* Attention span won't stop them recognizing a solution

* Numerous solutions won't stop them adopting one

* That the developer put little effort into building that solution won't put them off.

The real answer is of course that there's a lot of stuff that being built that doesn't solve people's problems people have, either because it targets a problem that doesn't really exist or because it fails to solve the problem it does target.

> When someone suggested the answer was marketing: > jUsT dO mOrE mArKeTiNg!!!!!

This is a good point. If there's a problem reaching people because the information channel is saturated, the solution is to increase the information? And then everyone reaches the same conclusion and increases.

This destroys the channel. It's not a zero sum game. If everyone markets, nobody will make the sale because the customer will nope out and see nothing.

Money is not a moat since you can buy money (debt) or sell equity for money.

>The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network

Social networks already is an existing competitive space and making it both paid and invite only obviously will hurt its adoption. I wouldn't have been surprised if this failed to get users even if it was free and even if this was preLLM. A brand new social network doesn't truly solve users problems.

> Creation used to be the scarce thing, the filter. Now attention is. Most of us are on the wrong side of that trade.

"Wrong side" means that people on that side have to work harder to reach us. The terms of the trade did not change because creators are not starting to pay us to get our attention. Well, it happens sometimes: free trials, free tiers, coupons, etc. but it's a well established practice. The post contains a reference to "do more marketing".

It’s been true for some time. That moat has been getting shallower and shallower everywhere it isn’t inherited wealth. Not entirely shocking, large amounts of human history have been organised that way.

I partly agree. Yes, the entry level is low. It helps me to gain time on my life, doing other things. But I do not believe that much that more people are going in. Most non coder people i know will not code a thing. Most bad student i got will not start to do side projects. So, yes people wanting to ship something ship more, but for the rest, there is still place.

I really like this article, particularly the part about the gravitational threshold. My overall thoughts about launching products is that there will just be more products with smaller audiences, similar to how streaming broke down linear cable. As a software entrepreneur, this means going wider not deeper. Use your human skills to build relationships with people who have that gravitational pull. If you don’t have those relationships, go create them IRL. For context, I’ve founded and sold a social network to AOL, helped raise over $100m, and had 2 other acquisitions.

Are you not concerned about getting a copyright strike from the fashion brand?

https://kith.com/

Kith looks interesting, but the main problem there is verifiability. How would it keep bad actors out? How does it verify posts by invitees aren't AI generated?

Utilizing connections with influencers seems to be the most effective way to break through the noise now. Ironically, that's how it used to be before marketing and product development became so accessible.

For the comment from "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning", the article author editorializes

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge."

into

"One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff."

which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly.

____

I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms

This post was an Ad also for his paid social network, it did reach me because the message resonates with me as a builder but I don't want to sign up to a social network

So the attention was there but not the conversion.

I liked the part about attention being the scarce resource now. Everyone is competing for your attention. But then I see a world in which openclaw is managing emails for people and searching the internet for them and shopping in their behalf. How long until we start seeing advertising specifically targeting AI instead of humans?

Not discrediting the post, which I think is worthwhile and generally pointing at the right thing, however:

> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.

They launched a paid social network, with no content available without joining a waitlist.

This would not have worked 20 years ago either. Bootstrapping the content for a _free_ social network is incredibly hard. But a paid social network where the only differentiating factor is that users are humans, and there is no activity in the network? Not going to work.

"the value of a human eyeball" / attention is and always will be the limited resource. But I wish the way the economy worked wasn't that attention is sold for money, which makes money the moat, and sets a floor on how low-priced things can get for customers too. Is this really the best the economy can do? Or is it possible to have a fair LLM-based search engine that matches customer need description with stated product descriptions from providers (while weighing customer reviews, etc)?

I disagree. Customer relationships, taste, creativity, tenacity, execution excellence, industry relevance, reputation, non-public data, etc... are all hard earned or intrinsic capabilities that matter a lot more than feature development speed/cost.

> the value of a human eyeball is going up

There must also be some value in advertising to the "eyeballs" of the AI? Even if they don't (yet) make that much decisions about spending, they do influence human decisions.

And the super rich now even switch to other people's money. A fund makes investments in SpaceX and Anthropic available:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-investors-access-space...

It would be hilarious if the final "IPOs" will be in SPAC form with the help of SPAC king Chamath.

>Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

>This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph

> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at.

Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed..

This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.

Building was already not the main obstacle before AI. Distribution was, and remains so - more than ever.

looks like the real tension here is that "money" and "reach" aren't quite the same moat though. I think the post kind of conflates them. existing audience is the actual barrier - money can buy ads but it can't buy trust or distribution, not quickly anyway

the gravitational threshold thing is real ngl. I've seen the same dynamic in product launches - identical quality, completely different outcomes based on whether you're already above the line or not. that part holds up

not sure the "creativity is the moat" counterargument fully lands either. yeah taste matters, but AstroBen's point is valid - anything that gets traction gets cloned basically immediately now. so creativity gets you first mover advantage for like... a week?

maybe the actual moat is just community? people who already trust you before you ship. which is a form of reach I guess, so kind of proves the point

I think there's still value in building quality products, but AI makes it easy to build something that appears good but doesn't actually work that well. It's very difficult to communicate the thought and intentionality that went into a well-designed product in a way that stands out amongst the noise.

If you thought things were hard now just wait for the industrial-scale fully automatic fast-follow bots that will nearly-universally nuke the human-created original product to oblivion in a few years...

The definition of a moat is what cannot be bought.