Comment by dist-epoch
8 hours ago
What was the moat of Dropbox? Of Instagram? Of GitHub? Or of countless other very successful startups when they started?
Anyone know when this "have no moat" meme appeared? Even 5 years ago I don't remember seeing it on every post.
Dropbox: is I have to move my entire collection and setup the app on all my devices
Instagram: I have to move all my posts and also convince all my network to move over
Github: not a terrible example
If I decided to move off of jev tomorrow it would be an api key and a base api path update. Maybe 30 seconds of work.
Whether a product has network effects makes a difference.
I would argue Dropbox did have a moat. It didn't merely store your data. It made it possible to make backup efficiently when bandwidth wasn't all that good.
Reading "no moat" so often is also tied to the fact those companies happen to be getting surreal valuations, at a quite early stage, showing no profit, building a tech that doesn't seem difficult to reproduce.
Instagram clearly did have one - Zuck had to acquire after internal efforts failed.
Dropbox had a super smooth UX that somehow nobody else replicated (seriously Google wtf). Instagram and Github won on network effects.