3 builders who never spoke to each other

Build the asset a rival cannot assemble in a weekend

Anyone can copy a format, a page or a piece of writing, so the defensible layer is whatever took relationships or physical effort to gather: a roster of named outside contributors, or something that cannot be reproduced in text and pixels at all. Content alone has stopped being a position.

The method

1. 01

   Recruit a large roster of named outside experts to publish on your site, because a competitor can copy the format but cannot quickly assemble the same contributors.

2. 02

   Build something that cannot be reproduced in words or pixels, because content alone is no longer a defensible position.

3. 03

   When a category floods with products built in a weekend and sold to uninformed buyers on social platforms, expect buyer fatigue and position on the things a weekend cannot produce: history, depth and community.

4. 04

   Defend a specialist position by leaning on domain knowledge, bespoke integrations and compliance paperwork, the parts a general-purpose provider cannot absorb quickly.

5. 05

   Stop treating your codebase as the defensible part of the business, because what remains defensible is deep data integration or an audience, not the technology.

What it returned

• 800

  Over 800 experts from hedge funds and investment firms now publish on Livewire. Six years after the pivot they had 250,000 monthly active users, and Similarweb now estimates around 500,000 monthly visits.

• 18

  Estimated at 18 to 36 months of work to replicate, which is what keeps the Harvey, Cognition and Pilot tier out of reach of frontier labs packaging their own version.

• Rand Fishkin's list of what an AI answer cannot deliver runs from ultrasonic chef's knives and made-to-measure suits to gift boxes curated from local makers, WWI-era Armagnac and hand-carved figures, plus mowing a lawn, fixing a roof or managing a retirement account; he says to find the overlap between what you can passionately make, what the market fails to offer and what people badly want.

• Zue describes a year of boilerplate land-grabbing on Twitter and Reddit and predicts the winners will be the products with long histories and larger communities.

Sources

• Livewire Revenue, Traffic & SEO Playbook (2023) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · An Interesting Concept Resulted In Australia’s Fastest Growing Investment Insights Website · 2023-06-24
• Bringing Back The "Be Your Own Consultant Challenge" - Double Your FreelancingBrennan Dunn · doubleyourfreelancing.com · You know, the sort of questions I ask all the time when working with clients! · 2017-02-18
• Inimitable Product is the New "Make Great Content" - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · Businesses and Creators Have But Two Solutions · undated
• AI Employees: Named Personas, Cautionary Tale, Outcome Pricing - Trends.vcDru Riley · trends.vc · 😠 Haters · 2026-05-21
• How will AI impact software boilerplate businesses?Cory Zue · coryzue.com · What do I actually believe? · 2025-02-12
• Software got weirdCory Zue · coryzue.com · There are no code moats anymore · 2026-03-06