Whenever I create something cool - especially here - people copy it. If I do something really cool, companies do it. I always feel like I gave people things who didn't even do it right.
However... a moat can also be just working on something that takes ~2 years to create. That gives you 2 years of moat at a time if you can repeat it, so it's a bigger treadmill that you can leisurely stroll along. Because you want to stay moving a little anyway, to stay relevant.
Think about what it takes to crawl the entire web and rank pages. Nobody can do it overnight. Find the things that nobody can do overnight, and spend 2 years on it, building up that value. No matter what, nobody can do it unless they spend those 2 years. Nobody will, except the ultra dedicated (hire them).
It takes that time... I think of this as like digging the moat where it doesn't naturally exist. You have a regular website that anybody could make, but you dug a moat by aggregating some value, or building it up, or connecting it to some external source of value that you have privileged access to.
If you patented it, they couldn't copy it (a lot of patents are secretly invalid, but they'd still need to hire lawyers to find out), but you'd be out $300
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Whenever I create something cool - especially here - people copy it. If I do something really cool, companies do it. I always feel like I gave people things who didn't even do it right.
However... a moat can also be just working on something that takes ~2 years to create. That gives you 2 years of moat at a time if you can repeat it, so it's a bigger treadmill that you can leisurely stroll along. Because you want to stay moving a little anyway, to stay relevant.
Think about what it takes to crawl the entire web and rank pages. Nobody can do it overnight. Find the things that nobody can do overnight, and spend 2 years on it, building up that value. No matter what, nobody can do it unless they spend those 2 years. Nobody will, except the ultra dedicated (hire them).
It takes that time... I think of this as like digging the moat where it doesn't naturally exist. You have a regular website that anybody could make, but you dug a moat by aggregating some value, or building it up, or connecting it to some external source of value that you have privileged access to.
If you patented it, they couldn't copy it (a lot of patents are secretly invalid, but they'd still need to hire lawyers to find out), but you'd be out $300