3 builders who never spoke to each other

Name the barrier that stops you being copied

A benefit with nothing protecting it is temporary, so decide early which advantage you are building and how a rival copying you would damage their own business. Ask specifically what remains of the product if the platform underneath it ships your feature next month.

The method

1. 01

   An advantage only counts if it pairs a benefit with a barrier. Without something stopping rivals copying it, the benefit is temporary.

2. 02

   Name the advantage you intend to hold before you have product-market fit. Not a written plan for every part of the business, just which power you are going for and how you will get it.

3. 03

   Position yourself so that copying you would damage the incumbent's own business. That is what lets a small company survive a rival with far more money.

4. 04

   Ask what your defence is when the product is mainly interface and plumbing over another company's API, and whether the incumbent apps will simply absorb the feature.

5. 05

   Avoid building the product whose entire value could be erased by a single feature announcement from the AI vendor you depend on.

What it returned

• 5

  He names amp, Factory, Cursor and Auggie as wrappers converging on the same feature set, notes amp demoted GPT-5 to a secondary role, and says a subscription direct from the model provider costs him about $1k a month against roughly 5 to 10 times that on API pricing

• Cheaper unit cost is the benefit, a switching cost is the barrier. A moat with nothing but a shack behind it protects nothing, and a fine castle with no moat gets taken.

• Counter-positioning is one of the seven powers, and the one tech startups typically reach for first before they have any scale.

• Zue points to Anthropic's legal and security tool announcements wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off related company valuations

Sources

• AI startups require new strategies: This time it’s actually differentJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Differentiation when everyone has the same technology · 2024-03-03
• Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering | Peter SteinbergerPeter Steinberger · steipete.me · Why not $harness · 2025-10-14
• Introducing ScrivCory Zue · coryzue.com · The bear case for Scriv · 2023-08-03
• Software got weirdCory Zue · coryzue.com · The golden age of indie businesses might be over · 2026-03-06
• Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)Hamilton Helmer · lennysnewsletter.com · 2024-05-05