edit: Oh, I see, the guy in the article was just throwing together random open source stuff not actually developing anything of value. Never mind.
User Experience. Developer Experience. Community. Those are moats you can bet on primarily because it takes so much dedication, expertise, and work. That's not easy to buy.
But that's what I'm saying. If you find some solution to a problem that's making decent money, some guy with big capital will just come in and "fast follow" you with better user experience and advertise the shit out of it until they have a better or at least more active community. Like suppose this guy's admissions scheduling app actually started making money. Why wouldn't some big player like Pearson just come in and roll him? They can easily hire a bunch of guys to copy what he's doing and then leverage their existing relationships with the education industry to lock him out.
And from what I’ve seen of Pearson, I highly doubt they have a clue. Their existing business survives due to market inertia, but they’re very far from delivering quality products.
Pearson doesn't need to deliver quality, they need to deliver functional + whatever sweetener on the rest of the contract to keep out the competition.
Look at markets that are worth it (e.g. cloud computing)- they have products from different companies with exactly the same features.
In general, I am not sure what you are proposing. Let me publish my ideas for free, see someone copies them, and that be happy that I got it right?
Large companies like Google and Facebook will regularly feign interest in someone's app or idea (that they might want to purchase), only to roll it out themselves.
That's the whole point of the advice: stop worrying about being copied. It's a fake problem.
The guest proposed a model of software features and why “agile” fails for a lot of people. On a two dimensional graph of difficulty and profitability, everyone avoids the high effort, low value quadrant. That’s a no brainer.
Problem is a lot of policy ends up avoiding the high-effort column entirely.
Low-effort features are only short term differentiators, if even that. They offer no long term viability.
To have features your competitors don’t have is going to take real work.
The only loophole I know for this is if my code quality is good, what is a moderate effort feature for me may be a high effort feature for you. If my pockets are deep I can just run my competitor down, by setting an agenda they can’t afford.
You have the first problem that well-funded competitors can almost certainly replicate whatever you built if they care to do so.
You then have a second problem that well-funded competitors can almost certainly market inferior tech as being equal to or superior to yours, if they care to do so.
It's the exception, not the rule though.
Google is pretty true, though.
Just this week Intel bought Havana labs for 2B due to their AI chip hardware.
Also, look at what AMD is doing to Intel. This is pure tech play (and pure moat).
The underlying rule in play, is that the tech business is bound to "leapfrogging", I.e. a better technology can destroy companies almost overnight (see the case of Nokia). So hard tech is more important than customers.
Look what Tesla is doing to GM, etc.
As for billion dollar acquisitions.... Visio, GitHub, Yammer, LinkedIn, Instagram, Parse, etc.... shit-tons of them are done for market reasons.
weird, I must be thinking of somebody else. Since it would make no sense for you to try to take both of those sides at once.
They almost never arrive fully formed and then take the market by storm, on the contrary most overnight successes have years of grinding away on a project behind them, not years of building, but years of tweaking, listening and going back to the drawing board.
The technology used doesn't really matter much, just use what you're comfortable with, because it's about 10% of the problem. The rest is hard work that can't be replicated overnight.