The words founders use wrong.
Most moat talk is decoration. These definitions are the ones TRIAL runs on, written the way we would say them across a table. Each one carries a real example and one thing most sites will not admit.
THE TERMS
- (01)
moat
A structural reason a competitor with more money still cannot take your customers.
- (02)
counter-positioning
Building your product so the incumbent's own business model stops it from copying you.
- (03)
wedge
The narrow, specific problem you solve first to get a door open before you sell anything bigger.
- (04)
switching cost
Everything a customer loses, in time, data, or risk, by moving to a competitor, even a better one.
- (05)
data loop
A cycle where more usage produces better data, which makes the product better, which drives more usage.
- (06)
network effect
When each new user makes the product more valuable for every existing user, not just for themselves.
- (07)
clone test
Asking whether a well funded team could rebuild your entire product in 90 days and still lose to you.
- (08)
defensibility clock
The countdown from launch to the day a copier can replicate your product with a weekend and a laptop.
- (09)
playground
The actual field you compete in: who else is there, what they give away free, and which gaps nobody has bothered to close.
- (10)
frame
The one sentence restatement of what a company actually is: the layer it sits on, the people it serves, and the mechanism that compounds.
- (11)
unfair asset
The thing you have that nobody else has, the single question no automated market scan can ever answer for you.
- (12)
resource lock
Your hours per week, cash you can burn per month, and exit target, the numbers that make a plan real instead of fiction with deadlines.
- (13)
exit target
The size of outcome you're actually building for: lifestyle income, a small exit of 1 to 10 million, or a big exit above 10 million.
- (14)
the unclonable
Value that only accumulates through actual use over time, and cannot be captured in a screenshot or a competitor's demo video.