Identifies which of the seven structural moats a business actually has, pressure-tests each claim against funded copycats and incumbent pivots, and delivers a moat scorecard with one moat to invest in deliberately.
Identifies which of the seven structural moats a business actually has, pressure-tests each claim against funded copycats and incumbent pivots, and delivers a moat scorecard with one moat to invest in deliberately. Use when someone asks "what's our moat", "is our product defensible", "a well-funded competitor just launched - what protects us", "investors keep asking about defensibility", or "which moat should we build first". Do NOT use for tracking what competitors are shipping and saying - use competitive-intelligence instead - or for finding unserved market segments - use white-space-analysis instead.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
competitive-moat/SKILL.md
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name: Competitive Moat Analysis
description: Identifies which of the seven structural moats a business actually has, pressure-tests each claim against funded copycats and incumbent pivots, and delivers a moat scorecard with one moat to invest in deliberately. Use when someone asks "what's our moat", "is our product defensible", "a well-funded competitor just launched - what protects us", "investors keep asking about defensibility", or "which moat should we build first". Do NOT use for tracking what competitors are shipping and saying - use competitive-intelligence instead - or for finding unserved market segments - use white-space-analysis instead.
---
# Competitive Moat Analysis
A moat is a structural reason an advantage compounds rather than erodes. Most "moats" founders cite - features, a head start, proprietary data - are things a funded competitor copies in a quarter, and the costly mistake is building a fundraise or a strategy on one of them. This skill separates real moats from wishful thinking and names the one moat worth building deliberately.
## Operating procedure
Run taxonomy before testing, and testing before measurement - you cannot stress-test a moat you have not precisely named, and you should not bother measuring one that fails the adversary test.
### Step 1: Gather inputs
1. The claimed advantages - everything the founder or team believes protects them, verbatim.
2. Business model and stage - who pays, how much, how customers onboard and leave.
3. Competitive set - the funded startups and the incumbents, with rough war chests.
4. Retention data if available - gross retention by cohort age; label estimates as guesses.
5. Pricing power evidence - has a price increase ever stuck without churn spiking?
### Step 2: Map each claim to the seven real moats
Every claimed advantage must land in exactly one of these buckets or be reclassified as "feature, not moat":
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