Unpopular opinion: pure tech as a moat is dead

For a long time I believed a good enough product eventually wins. that if you build something that works and keep improving it, the market sorts itself out in your favor. I don't believe that to be true anymore. AI changed the actual cost of building something, because what used to take a team months now takes days for basically anyone in a category. Once everyone can build roughly the same thing pretty quickly, having a working product doesn't really tell you much anymore. and now that building is so cheap this applies to bootstrapped companies too, not only startups that raised capital. So whatever is still deciding outcomes has to be something that didn't get cheap along with the product which is basically earned trust and distribution being the name someone thinks of without being told to. The product still has to work obviously. But that's just the baseline now, it doesn't automatically make people notice you. I learned this the hard way, watching a worse product beat me with better positioning, long before I understood why. I spent years thinking of marketing as something you hire out once the product's good enough. but with my 2nd SaaS (called Kuron) this is the first thing I have to get right before the product is even launched. and i wish i had done this during the early stages of my first saas too Late lesson is still a lesson 🙂