This is true, and a useful book on positioning is: https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/00...

Furthermore, one way to avoid ending up in a feature for feature fight to the death with a bigger player is to think instead in terms of “job to be done”: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done

By planning what you work on by focusing on what the customer is trying to achieve you’ll do yourself a favour when it comes to marketing as you’ll be able to speak in terms they understand.

Lastly, as you’ll see in the positioning book above, it’s not wise to completely avoid competitor analysis despite how unpleasant and draining it can sometimes be. A potential customer needs to understand why they would choose you over the incumbent. You need to know that answer before they can.

The "job to be done" is essentially just another term for the customer's need, right? To me, the main utility of that phrase is that it emphasizes the mindset of the customer much more than looking for a need.

Yes that’s my understanding but looking at it as a job to be done intuitively moves towards how they currently do the job. This can often reveal other areas where you can help.

Anyone can build a feature you can. Some market segments have existing players and people shouldn't be afraid to play competitively. You don't live in a bubble and you can innovate all day but your customers are still the same people with the same needs. Either you are solving them, in which case someone else will too. Or you are trying to sell them your toy project and convince them they have a problem that it solves. SV has burned through billions on projects that were hyper niche or had no market at all.

You can make a moat around your product, but that is different. You still have a core value proposition that solves their real world problem and there will be other people solving it too.

Most companies build moats through contractual lock in, trust and size, or simply buying their competitors. I have yet to see a feature only moat.

Supreme is the company I like to bring up as one that survives on almost 100% pure positioning. The "feature" Supreme released a few years ago was a brick with the Supreme logo on it which sold out instantly and started going on eBay for $1000.

This is a feature that no other company could have built. Every single one of Supreme's competitors could have known that Supreme would be releasing the brick and the information would be utterly useless to them because only Supreme could have released the Supreme brick.

On the one end you have Supreme and the other you have pure commodities and It's up to you to figure out where you'd like to be along that spectrum.

> I have yet to see a feature only moat.

Features that induce a significant network effect can potentially lead to a moat. No contracts necessary.

(Maybe this is what you meant when you mentioned "size" as a moat-building mechanism.)

Yep, that was the intent behind mentioning size. Google could be said to have a network effect based moat around Google Docs for example.

I think the tech world's use of the word "commodity" is interesting. "becoming a commodity" really means "fail to establish a monopoly".

That's what commodity means in economics, up to the level of precision implied by your statement.

www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commodity.asp

I think most people understand commodity as things like: iron ore, sugar, rice, chemicals, raw materials.

For example, take a Toyota Prius. Most people would not think of that as a commodity. It also is not a monopoly. If Toyota Prius where a software tech startup, they would be bemoaning the fact that they have become a "commodity" (read: it's become a competitive market where consumers have choice between differentiated goods).