[kypro]

> 8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company.

Just my opinion, but technology moats are very hard to achieve, and almost impossible if you're a solo founder. How exactly are you going to achieve a technology moat with no capital as a solo founder? Do you honestly believe you are such a good developer that no one is going to be able to recreate what you've done? Probably not.

Technology moats generally take two forms: Either they prohibitively expensive, or they're prohibitively complex - or both. If you're not a multi-millionaire or you don't have a 100 person team, in all likeliness you're not doing either.

As a solo founder what you to look for is something that has network effects, that you can brand effectively, or a market that's has some non-tech barrier to entry. A non-tech barriers to entry might include geographical constraints or trust.

Another thing I'd add about high-tech startups is that they're probably one of the hardest ways to make money. You want to build some kind of AI tool? Okay, good luck competing with some of the smartest people on Earth to build that. Personally I like to look for places where people much less intelligent than me are making good money then see if I can improve on what they're doing with some simple technology. This is the genius of startups like Uber. The taxi industry was an incredibly low-tech industry prior to Uber. It was a great candidate for how some relatively simple tech combined with network-effects can become a multi-billion dollar company.

[lee101]

I'm a solo founder of https://text-generator.io I feel fairly confident about the value proposition and technical moat, I have huge competitors like OpenAI, Copilot and huggingface working hard on the problem too.

I'm confident in selling it for 25k per year to businesses because:

* there's a one line migration in from OpenAI

* Self housting will save the companies entire OpenAI bill

* OpenAI doesn't have some features I do like autocomplete or generating a set number of sentences

* Generating multi lingual text and code is a hard problem to solve yourself, specifically it's a larger than 25k development problem, so will cost more if you want to try solve it yourself right now, so businesses would rather pay some money to have it now which also reduces risk for them.

With a lot of experience in a field and hard work it's very possible to create something others can't feasibly do, or do for the price you do

[muttled]

I think moats can also come if you have a cross-section of skills that another solo developer might lack. If you happen to have intimate knowledge of a super-specific niche industry, for example. Not just the knowledge, but the connections to get your product in front of the people who might use it in that industry.

[fxtentacle]

Strong disagree. A solo founder working on the same product for years means they'll have in depth knowledge that few (if any) experts can match. That's a very strong technical moat.