Glossary
Competitive Moat
A durable structural advantage that makes it hard for competitors to erode your market position.
A competitive moat is a sustainable defense against competition. Classic moats include network effects (each user makes the product more valuable for the next), switching costs (leaving is painful), proprietary data (you have what no one else can rebuild), brand, scale economies, and regulatory capture. In SaaS, integrations, workflow depth, and deeply-owned customer data are the most common moats.
Features are not moats — any feature can be copied in a quarter. Real moats compound: more customers generate more data, which improves the product, which attracts more customers. When evaluating a moat, ask what a well-funded competitor could not replicate within 18 months even if they tried.
Why it matters
In a world where AI can clone an MVP in weeks, moats are the difference between a sustainable business and a feature that gets absorbed into a larger platform.
Related terms
Product Differentiation
The way a product is meaningfully different from alternatives on dimensions the target customer cares about.
Market Share
The percentage of total category revenue or customers captured by a given company.
Market Positioning
The place a product occupies in the mind of its target customer relative to alternatives.
Porter's Five Forces
Michael Porter's framework for analyzing industry structure through five competitive forces.
Blue Ocean Strategy
A strategy of creating uncontested market space rather than competing in crowded, zero-sum categories.