The moat is not to be spoken of, not to be acknowledged, the moat is secret.
Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
#12Same as it’s always been.
Re: Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
#13While it may be easier to build features, or even a simple product, marketing and sales are only getting harder. Your moat is your ability to grow fast, capture market and earn customer loyalty. From that perspective, technical skills need to move more into GTM engineering to a degree.
But what's sad about what you're suggesting is that we've built the most advanced LLMs in the history of humanity and all we can think to do with them is clone something that already exists. Innovation still requires a human brain and the LLMs only know what they've been told.
So I would say the need for technical skills is actually even more acute. We need smart people to solve highly complex problems as well as teams of developers to deliver quality, secure and efficient code.
Re: Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
#14If anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week, then I already am pretty impressed. But assuming it's true, I would also assume that "anyone" is somewhat exclusive to people who already understand or have the ability to understand how existing SaaS products work. So that just means every company should have a team of people creating whatever SaaS products they need that week. Except that would create so much unreas…
> If anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week, then I already am pretty impressed.
Yea, it's not true. Currently I'm seeing this business style type of co-founder that I met through a mutual connection. He can do things I couldn't, but cloning a SaaS under a week? It's not one of them.
He created an interactive prototype with lovable.dev and while it fleshes out his idea to me, he clearly isn't strong in UX-design either. Nor does he need to be.
Re: Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
#15i feel like given the commoditization of certain type of analytical skill through AI, the competitive advantage in general (on both an individual and company level) is shifting towards the ability to tap into higher order human abilities that are outside of what AI can do (or will ever be able to do).
- how broad and deep is your perceptive ability? can you see things that others are not able to see?
- how deep is your empathic and energetic attunement? can you sense subtleties in interpersonal interaction that others miss?
- how connected you are to the somatic wisdom of your body? how self-aware are anble to self-regulate you? do you allow your triggers to cloud your judment and blind you?
- how connected are you to your intuitive ability? can you know things that you have not learned? can you tap into uniquely creative ideas that no one has explored? this is not coming from the analytical mind.
my hot take is this: meditation and somatic practice is no longer optional in the age of AI. while everyone is deeply in the AI frenzy, the people who will stand out from the crowd are the ones who go all in to cultivate self-awareness and higher order human abilities.