In our previous discussion of software moats, I explored how the commoditization of code is reshaping competitive advantages in software. I covered four crucial moats that will define successful software businesses in 2025:
- community (your network moat),
- customer support and success (your human moat),
- data network effects (your intelligence moat), and
- trust infra (your reliability moat).
But understanding these moats isn’t enough—you need to know how to build them systematically and measure their effectiveness. That’s what this software moat playbook is about. Whether you’re starting from scratch or strengthening existing moats, you’ll find practical, actionable guidance here.
This playbook is divided into three main sections:
- A step-by-step implementation guide for your first 90 days
- Comprehensive metrics frameworks for measuring each moat
- Common pitfalls to avoid and how to overcome them
If you haven’t, read the first part explaining the fundamental concepts behind these moats, I recommend starting there.
However, if you’re already familiar with the concepts, you can dive straight into this implementation guide.
Building your moat strategy: Step-by-step implementation guide
Creating defensive moats for your software business isn’t a linear journey. Instead, think of it as orchestrating multiple streams that flow together, each reinforcing the others. This guide provides a systematic approach to building and strengthening your moats over the first 90 days and beyond.
Phase 1: Foundation (Days 1-30)
Your first month isn’t about building perfect moats—it’s about laying groundwork that can scale. Each foundational element should be simple enough to manage manually but structured to support future growth.
Network moat (Community)
Your community foundation needs to balance immediate engagement with long-term scalability:
Set up your primary community platform
- Choose between Discord (real-time engagement), or Slack (business-focused interaction) – in some cases you might want to have both
- Create basic channels: announcements, help, feedback, showcase
- Write clear community guidelines and moderation policies
- Set up welcome workflows for new members
Begin content and engagement
- Start a weekly update thread or newsletter
- Document early user stories and use cases
- Create a simple onboarding guide for new community members
- Begin collecting user-generated content (templates, guides, tips)
Human moat (Support and Success)
Start with high-touch, personal support that you can gradually systematize:
Essential support infrastructure
- Set up a shared support email or basic help desk
- Create templates for common responses
- Build a simple customer database (even if it’s just a spreadsheet)
- Establish response time goals
Knowledge capture system
- Start documenting all user interactions
- Create a basic knowledge base structure
- Record common questions and solutions
- Begin tracking feature requests and feedback
Intelligence moat (Data)
Focus on capturing the right data from the start—you can’t analyze what you don’t collect:
Analytics foundation
- Implement privacy-compliant analytics
- Create your data dictionary
- Set up basic event tracking
- Configure daily and weekly metrics reports
User insight collection
- Document feature usage patterns
- Track user journeys and drop-off points
- Begin collecting qualitative feedback
- Start mapping common user workflows
Reliability moat (Trust)
Build trust through transparency and consistent operation:
Essential documentation
- Write clear Terms of Service
- Create comprehensive Privacy Policy
- Document security practices
- Establish data handling procedures
Basic infrastructure
- Set up a public status page
- Create incident response templates
- Implement backup procedures
- Configure basic monitoring
Phase 2: Connection (Days 31-60)
Now that foundations are in place, focus on creating connections between your moats.
This phase is about building feedback loops and strengthening each element through interaction with others.
Network + human integration
- Launch a public feedback board visible to all community members
- Create community-led support channels
- Implement a user onboarding buddy system
- Begin collecting and sharing success stories
- Start weekly office hours with core team members
Intelligence + trust enhancement
- Create and share your first benchmark report
- Implement granular user data controls
- Begin sharing aggregated community insights
- Build privacy-first analytics dashboards
- Establish data retention and cleanup procedures
Community + data synergy
- Launch feature voting/feedback system
- Create engagement tracking metrics
- Begin measuring community health
- Start template and resource sharing
- Implement contribution tracking
Support + trust reinforcement
- Begin tracking and publishing SLAs
- Create monthly transparency reports
- Launch customer health scoring
- Build automated issue detection
- Implement regular backup testing
Phase 3: Amplification (Days 61-90)
With foundations built and connections established, focus on amplifying the effectiveness of each moat while strengthening their interconnections.
Community amplification
Launch community ambassador program
- Define roles and responsibilities
- Create recognition system
- Establish communication channels
- Begin regular ambassador meetings
Enhance engagement
- Start community challenges
- Create content contribution program
- Implement recognition system
- Begin community-led events
Support and success enhancement
Scale personal touch
- Create automated but personalized onboarding
- Build knowledge base from support patterns
- Launch proactive support programs
- Implement success milestones
Data evolution
Launch data-driven features
- Implement first ML-powered features (when and if applicable)
- Create predictive user journeys
- Build automated insights
- Begin cohort analysis
Trust reinforcement
Strengthen reliability
- Launch regular security updates
- Create incident post-mortem process
- Implement advanced monitoring
- Start reliability reporting
Measuring progress and metrics
Track these metrics regularly to gauge the strength of your moats.
Community metrics
Engagement depth
Active participation
- Daily/weekly/monthly active members
- Activity frequency per member
- Time spent in community
- Return visit frequency
- Cross-thread participation rate
Content generation
- User-generated content volume
- Content quality scores
- Content variety (posts, comments, resources)
- Creator-to-consumer ratio
- Top contributor retention rate
Interaction quality
- Response rates in discussions
- Average response quality scores
- Time to first response
- Discussion depth (replies per thread)
- Meaningful interaction rate
Community health
- Member retention rates
- New member activation rate
- Member progression through engagement levels
- Community satisfaction scores
- Member lifetime value
Growth and network effect
Growth
- New member acquisition rate
- Invitation acceptance rate
- Member referral frequency
- Growth rate by segment
- Geographic distribution
Value creation
- Knowledge base contributions
- Resource sharing frequency
- Problem-solving effectiveness
- Community-driven feature adoption
- Peer support success rate
Support and success metrics
Core metrics
Time to First Value (TTV)
- Track how quickly new users achieve their first meaningful outcome
- Measure specific milestones like first project completion or workflow automation
- Set stage-appropriate targets (e.g., 24 hours for simple tools, 7 days for complex platforms)
- Monitor TTV trends across different user segments
Support-influenced revenue
- Track upgrades within 30 days of support interactions
- Measure expansion revenue from accounts with high support engagement
- Monitor referrals from satisfied support experiences
- Calculate the ratio of support costs to support-influenced revenue
Knowledge base effectiveness
- Calculate the deflection rate (issues resolved without human intervention)
- Track most-accessed documentation
- Measure time spent in the knowledge base before creating tickets
- Monitor documentation feedback and ratings
Customer Health Score (CHS)
- Product usage frequency (25%)
- Feature adoption depth (20%)
- Support interaction quality (15%)
- Community engagement (15%)
- Payment history (15%)
- Login recency (10%)
Component weights should be adjusted based on your product, these are just illustrative ones.
Support quality metrics
Response time metrics
- First response time
- Resolution time
- Time between responses
- Support queue length
Satisfaction metrics
- CSAT scores
- NPS after support interactions
- Resolution satisfaction
- Support interaction quality ratings
Support efficiency
- Tickets per customer
- Self-service success rate
- Escalation frequency
- Resolution with first response rate
Data metrics
Data quality and coverage
Collection effectiveness
- Data completeness rates
- Field accuracy scores
- Collection consistency
- Coverage across user segments
- Data freshness metrics
Processing efficiency
- Processing time metrics
- Error rates in data pipeline
- Data validation success rates
- Integration effectiveness
- Recovery time from failures
Value generation
Feature adoption and usage
- Feature discovery rates
- Usage frequency patterns
- Feature stickiness scores
- Cross-feature adoption
- Feature abandonment rates
Prediction and intelligence
- Model accuracy rates
- Prediction confidence scores
- False positive/negative rates
- Model improvement rate
- User acceptance of suggestions
Insight generation
- Insight production frequency
- Insight adoption rates
- Impact on user behavior
- Time to insight generation
- Insight quality scores
Network effect strength
- Data network growth rate
- Value improvement per data point
- Cross-user learning effectiveness
- Collaborative filtering accuracy
- Network effect coefficient
Trust metrics
System reliability
Uptime and performance
- System availability percentage
- Response time metrics
- Error rates by category
- Recovery time objectives
- Performance under load
Security metrics
- Security incident frequency
- Time to detect threats
- Resolution time for vulnerabilities
- Security audit scores
- Compliance adherence rates
User trust
Privacy management
- Privacy request handling speed
- Consent management effectiveness
- Data deletion compliance
- Privacy complaint resolution
- Data access request completion
Transparency metrics
- Status page accuracy
- Incident communication speed
- Update transparency scores
- Documentation freshness
- Change notification effectiveness
User control
- Self-service success rate
- Account management ease
- Privacy control usage
- Data portability metrics
- User autonomy scores
Metrics implementation framework
For each metric category:
Early stage focus (1-100 users)
- Choose 2-3 core metrics per moat
- Manual tracking acceptable
- Focus on qualitative feedback
- Weekly measurement cycles
Growth stage requirements (100-1000 users)
- Implement automated tracking
- Add derivative metrics
- Begin trend analysis
- Daily measurement cycles
Scale stage needs (1000+ users)
- Full metrics implementation
- Advanced analytics
- Predictive modeling
- Real-time monitoring
Measurement cadence
Daily monitoring
- Active user metrics
- System performance
- Critical incidents
- Core engagement rates
Weekly analysis
- Growth trends
- Quality metrics
- Network effect strength
- Trust indicators
Monthly review
- Comprehensive health check
- Network effect analysis
- Trust evolution
- Strategic alignment
Quarterly assessment
- Long-term trend analysis
- Network effect valuation
- Trust equity measurement
- Strategic planning
Metric interdependencies
Understanding how metrics interact across moats:
- Community engagement driving data quality
- Trust metrics influencing community growth
- Data network effects enhancing community value
- Trust enabling stronger data collection
Remember to adjust weights and importance based on:
- Your product type
- User base characteristics
- Growth stage
- Market conditions
- Strategic priorities
Common pitfalls to avoid
Building in isolation
- Don’t treat moats as separate entities
- Ensure each initiative strengthens multiple moats
- Create clear connections between different areas
- Regular cross-functional reviews
Premature automation
- Start with manual processes to understand patterns
- Automate only what works consistently
- Maintain human oversight of automated systems
- Regular automation audits
Neglecting documentation
- Document processes from day one
- Create clear handoff procedures
- Maintain updated playbooks
- Regular documentation reviews
Inconsistent engagement
- Better to do less consistently than more sporadically
- Create sustainable engagement patterns
- Build reliable feedback loops
- Regular engagement audits
Remember these elements when building your software moat playbook
Your moats are interconnected systems that strengthen each other:
- Strong communities help support
- Good support builds trust
- Trust enables better data collection
- Data improves community engagement
Start where you have the most leverage, but keep all four moats in mind as you build. Focus on consistency and sustainable growth rather than rapid but unstable expansion.
The commoditization of software development isn’t a threat – it’s an opportunity to focus on what truly matters. While others chase feature parity, you can build deeper connections with users, gather unique insights from data, and establish unshakeable trust.
Start small, but start today. Pick one area to focus on this week:
- Join relevant communities where your potential users gather
- Set up basic analytics to understand user behavior
- Write down your customer success principles
- Document your security and privacy practices
Share your journey with me on Twitter/X @viborc
These moats become your competitive edge in a world where anyone can build an app. The question isn’t whether you need them – it’s how quickly you can start building them.
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
