Software is easier to build now than ever. AI, low-code tools, and managed cloud services mean a solo founder can launch an MVP in days.
But that begs the question: if building apps isn’t the hard part anymore, what truly gives a startup an edge in 2025 and beyond? What are the actual software moats?
In this post, I’ll explore four moats that can safeguard your product and set you apart in a crowded market. I’ve been building products, experiences, and communities for over a decade, and now feels like the right time to share what I’ve learned—especially as AI continues to reshape how software is built.
Here’s a reality check: if you build it, they won’t just come. Too many people think that launching a product is enough. Let’s dig into the strategies that actually drive growth and sustainability.
The new reality of software development
The barriers to building software are crumbling. Tools like GitHub Copilot or Zencoder write code for you, while low or no-code platforms such as Lovable or Bolt let non-developers create surprisingly complex applications. Meanwhile, cloud providers handle the infrastructure headaches.
This democratization is exciting, but it also means technical advantages rarely last. That killer feature you spent months perfecting? A competitor could replicate it in weeks.
Still, it’s not all bad news. When anyone can clone your core features overnight, the real race is to build advantages they can’t just copy-paste.
For large enterprises with abundant resources, the competitive landscape may look different.
However, for smaller players and indie hackers/solo founders competing on a more level field, developing moats that extend beyond the code becomes even more critical.
In a world where software is commoditized, the human element—community, brand loyalty, and user involvement—often becomes the key differentiator, far harder to replicate than a single feature.
Below are four software moats that will define successful software businesses in 2025 and beyond:
- Community (Network moat)
- Customer support and success (Human moat)
- Data network effects (Intelligence moat)
- Trust infrastructure (Reliability moat)
Community – Your network moat
A vibrant community creates a powerful network effect that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Take Notion as an example. Early users became passionate evangelists, creating thousands of templates and tutorials on Twitter and YouTube. This network of engaged users and their collective knowledge did more for Notion’s growth than any marketing campaign could have achieved.
Like a medieval moat that grew deeper and wider over time, a strong community creates an expanding barrier that protects and strengthens your product’s position in the market.
Some of the lasting advantages of communities are reflected in the following:
- Knowledge multiplication
When users teach each other, they generate far more resources and tutorials than your team could produce alone. - Real-time feedback
Community members surface bugs and suggest improvements as they happen, often catching issues before they affect your broader user base. - Social proof engine
Active discussions and shared success stories signal staying power to prospective customers, boosting credibility. - Growth catalyst
Enthusiastic users spread the word organically, driving adoption through genuine word-of-mouth. They’re also more willing to beta-test new features and offer constructive feedback, helping you iterate faster and avoid costly missteps. - Brand affinity and trust
Strong communities foster loyalty beyond a single feature. When people identify with a brand, they become advocates who bring in new users at no added cost. - Network Effects
The value increases in certain product categories—platforms, social networks, and marketplaces—as more people use the product. An engaged community can self-organize for peer support, user-generated content, or real-time feedback loops even for non-marketplace software.
For indie hackers, community building often starts small but compounds quickly. The founder of Typefully, for instance, began by openly sharing his product-building journey on Twitter, attracting a following before launch.
Similarly, communities like Build in Public on Twitter (now X) unite makers who share insights, updates, and support—a perfect example of how an online community can boost product decisions and growth even at an early stage.
Tactical ways communities give an advantage
There are several tactical ways in which communities give you an advantage.
- Lower churn
When users feel like they belong to a community, they’re more likely to stay, reducing the chances of them jumping to a competitor. - Co-creation
Users can create extensions, plug-ins, or how-to guides—improving your own development and marketing efforts. This is especially powerful in open-source ecosystems. - Faster brand adoption
Community members often onboard new users organically by sharing success stories and best practices. A competitor that’s purely feature-focused can’t replicate this grassroots momentum overnight.
Challenges in building a community
This could be a post on its own, but building communities comes with many challenges. The two biggest ones are consistency (and authenticity) and resource commitment – I’m listing them here just to provide a more balanced view.
- Consistency and authenticity
Building trust requires steady engagement and transparent communication. You can’t fake genuine interaction for quick gains; consistent effort over time is crucial. - Resource commitment
Effective community-building involves hosting events, creating content, moderating forums, and supporting user-group leaders. Founders and small teams often lack the time or budget to do this well unless they prioritize it.
Customer success and support – Your human moat
When products become technically similar, the human element becomes your differentiator. And that’s your second software moat.
When Superhuman launched, founder Rahul Vohra spent 30 minutes onboarding each early user personally. The result? A legendary 58% of users became daily active users—unheard of in email software. While personally onboarding every user isn’t infinitely scalable, it demonstrates a profound truth: in a world of technical parity, the human element becomes your strongest differentiator.
The evolution of customer success
The path from basic support to customer success excellence follows a natural progression that strengthens your human moat at each stage.
Foundation – Beyond ticket resolution
Support isn’t merely about fixing bugs or answering basic questions. True customer success means partnering with users to achieve their goals, turning every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen relationships and ensure users extract maximum value from your product. This foundation shapes how users perceive your entire offering.
Building – The high-touch advantage
In your early stages, personal connection creates lasting impressions.
While it may not scale indefinitely, starting with high-touch support builds the patterns for excellent service. Document everything during this phase—create playbooks from successful onboarding sessions, record personalized welcome videos, and build a knowledge base from real user interactions.
Scaling – The hybrid approach
As you grow, blend automation with human interaction thoughtfully. Use AI-driven tools for routine queries while preserving human connection for complex issues and high-value interactions.
The key is creating clear trigger points that escalate to human support at the right moment, ensuring no user falls through the cracks.
Turning support into a growth engine
Support becomes a powerful moat when you transform it from a cost center into a growth driver. This transformation happens through three key mechanisms:
Relationship-driven retention
Build deep connections by tracking and celebrating customer milestones, conducting regular check-ins based on usage patterns (not just when things go wrong), and proactively recommending features that align with user behavior.
These touchpoints create an emotional investment in your product.
Feedback-to-feature pipeline
Create clear channels for routing support insights to your product team. Share roadmap updates influenced by user feedback and close the loop by notifying users when their suggestions become features.
This dialogue shows users they’re partners in your product’s evolution.
Knowledge multiplication
Transform every support interaction into reusable knowledge. Convert common questions into documentation, build searchable resources organized by user journey stage, and enable community knowledge sharing through moderated forums.
This compounds the value of every support interaction.
The measurement and tracking of these elements form a crucial part of your moat strategy.
You’ll find detailed implementation guides, metrics frameworks, and stage-specific measurements in the strategy section, where we break down exactly how to build and strengthen your support moat over time.
Data network effects – Your intelligence moat
The real power of data in 2025 isn’t just having it—it’s in creating self-reinforcing loops that make your product smarter and more valuable with each user interaction.
Consider Grammarly: every correction a user accepts or rejects doesn’t just improve their writing; it refines the suggestions for everyone. This network effect creates a widening gap between early movers and followers.
Understanding data network effects
Data network effects occur when your product becomes more valuable as it collects and learns from user data.
But contrary to popular belief, you don’t need millions of users to create this advantage. The key is identifying the right data points and creating tight feedback loops.
Starting small: The first 100 users
In the early stages, focus on collecting high-quality data that directly impacts product decisions:
User behavior tracking
- Set up comprehensive event tracking (tools like PostHog or Mixpanel)
- Focus on core user journeys and drop-off points
- Document exactly how users discover and use key features
Feedback collection
- Implement in-app feedback mechanisms at critical moments
- Record user sessions (with permission) to understand usage patterns
- Create a systematic process for categorizing and analyzing feedback
Pattern recognition
- Map common user workflows and identify optimization opportunities
- Track feature adoption sequences (what users typically learn first, second, etc.)
- Document recurring pain points and their context
Scaling smart: 1000+ users
As your user base grows, shift focus to creating intelligent systems that leverage your data:
Benchmarking and insights
- Create industry benchmarks from aggregated data
- Develop user maturity models based on behavior patterns
- Share anonymized insights that help users improve
Predictive features
- Implement “next best action” suggestions based on user behavior
- Build early warning systems for user churn
- Create personalized onboarding paths based on user characteristics
Collaborative intelligence
-
- Enable template sharing between users
- Create recommendation systems based on similar user profiles
- Build machine learning models that improve core product functionality
Creating data feedback loops
The key to sustainable data network effects is creating tight feedback loops – generally, three of them are used:
Collection
- Identify key moments in the user journey
- Implement lightweight data collection
- Ensure data quality and consistency
Analysis
- Process data in real-time where possible
- Look for patterns and anomalies
- Connect data points across user segments
Implementation
- Turn insights into product improvements
- Test changes with user segments
- Measure impact and iterate
Trust infrastructure – Your reliability moat
Trust isn’t earned through promises – it’s built through consistent, reliable execution across every touchpoint of your business – making it another software moat for you.
While data breaches and privacy concerns dominate headlines, true reliability encompasses something far broader: the entire operational backbone of your service. This includes everything from how you handle security and user data to how smoothly your systems run and how transparently you communicate with users.
Think of companies like Stripe or Cloudflare – their reputation for reliability wasn’t built on marketing claims, but on years of consistent uptime, transparent incident handling, and rock-solid operations.
A reliability moat emerges when trust and operational excellence become so deeply intertwined in your company’s DNA that competitors can’t easily replicate your standard of dependability.
You can consistently emphasize transparency, ops excellence, and user empowerment over longer periods to achieve it. Here’s how…
Building trust through transparency
Security transparency
- Write security policies in clear, jargon-free language
- Provide regular security updates and audit reports
- Document your security practices and certifications
- Implement and clearly explain data encryption practices
Product transparency
- Maintain a public roadmap
- Document all API changes and deprecations
- Provide detailed system status updates
- Share post-mortems after incidents
Business transparency
- Publish clear, simple pricing with no hidden fees
- Document all terms and conditions in plain language
- Share your privacy practices and data usage policies
- Maintain open communication about company changes
Operational excellence
System reliability
- Implement comprehensive monitoring
- Set up automated alerting systems
- Create incident response playbooks
- Regular backup and recovery testing
Communication systems
- Establish incident communication protocols
- Create status page with real-time updates
- Set up automated incident notifications
- Maintain regular update channels
Data management
- Implement robust backup systems
- Create data retention policies
- Set up disaster recovery procedures
- Regular security testing and audits
User empowerment
Data control
- Provide easy data export options
- Allow granular privacy settings
- Enable account deletion with clear process
- Offer data portability options
Service control
- Simple subscription management
- Clear cancellation processes
- Transparent billing and refund practices
- Easy service level adjustments
Trust is built through consistent, reliable operation over time. Each positive interaction strengthens your trust moat, while a single breach can severely damage it. Focus on building systems that make trustworthy operation the default, not the exception.
Next up – implementing your software moats
The landscape of software development has fundamentally shifted. While code becomes increasingly commoditized, these four moats—community, customer success, data network effects, and trust—create lasting competitive advantages that can’t be easily replicated. They form the foundation of sustainable software businesses in 2025 and beyond.
But understanding these moats is just the beginning. The real challenge lies in implementing them systematically and measuring their effectiveness. How do you build these software moats day by day? What metrics indicate whether your moats are getting stronger? How do you avoid common pitfalls that can drain your resources without strengthening your position?
In the next part of this series, “The software moat playbook: Metrics, strategy, and implementation,” I’ll explore the practical aspects of building these moats. I’ll share a detailed 90-day implementation plan, comprehensive metrics frameworks, and stage-specific guidance suitable for different growth phases.
Whether you’re a solo founder just starting out or leading a growing team, you’ll get concrete, actionable steps to start building your moats today.
Follow me on Twitter/X @viborc to be notified when the implementation guide goes live. UPDATE: It’s live now :)
Here’s how you can support us
We hope you like our content. You can support us in several ways. If you use ad-blocking software, please consider adding us to a safelist. When sharing our content, please link back to the source. When sharing on Instagram, please tag @viborccom. The same is for Twitter/X (@viborccom).
Thanks! Hvala! Danke! Дякую!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
