Moat Analysis

---
name: moat-analysis
description: Analyze whether a product has or could build durable advantage through switching costs, network effects, proprietary data, distribution, brand, scale, ecosystem, workflow embedding, cost structure, or accumulated capability using evidence rather than moat vocabulary.
---
# Moat Analysis

Use when strategy depends on whether an advantage can persist after competitors understand the product.

## Procedure
1. Define the customer value and competitive context before discussing defensibility.
2. Identify candidate advantage mechanisms and describe the causal loop that would make each strengthen with adoption, time, scale, or accumulated use.
3. Gather evidence that the mechanism actually exists: retention, switching behavior, data improvement, partner density, unit cost curves, distribution efficiency, brand preference, or workflow dependence as relevant.
4. Distinguish current advantage from a future moat hypothesis that still requires investment and adoption.
5. Test how a well-funded or fast-moving competitor could copy the visible feature and what would remain difficult to reproduce.
6. Identify costs or liabilities of the moat mechanism, such as lock-in distrust, marketplace quality problems, privacy constraints, ecosystem governance, or capital intensity.
7. Evaluate whether product roadmap and go-to-market choices reinforce or weaken the candidate advantage.
8. State the evidence and milestones that would show the moat is compounding or failing to materialize.

## Decision rules
- A feature is not a moat merely because it is currently unique.
- Defensibility needs a causal mechanism competitors cannot cheaply reproduce.
- Future moat claims are hypotheses until real behavior demonstrates compounding advantage.
- Durable advantage should reinforce customer value, not depend solely on trapping customers.

## Quality gate
The analysis is ready when each claimed advantage has an explicit causal mechanism, present evidence is separated from future hypothesis, copy risk and liabilities are examined, and the strategy identifies concrete actions and metrics that would strengthen or falsify defensibility.