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Swapan's avatar

Great points! A key factor is deep integration into a company's workflows and software. This creates strong lock-in effects, as high switching costs make it difficult for businesses to move away.

In the age of AI, vertical SaaS is the way forward. Anything surface-level is easy to replicate, so building deep expertise within a specific vertical creates significant barriers to entry for new competitors.

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Dhananjay Adodra's avatar

This is a thoughtful perspective, but I believe there’s still a risk that, despite moving quickly, offering great UX, and building strong distribution, competitors could replicate these features and catch up. Customers might then switch to a cheaper alternative once it’s available.

Would you agree that the key to preventing this is to create products with significant value lock-in? For instance, incorporating features and UX that make it difficult for users to migrate content and workflows to competitors. Additionally, the value of content or workflows created in your product should grow over time as the product learns from customer usage (e.g., through continuous training and fine-tuning).

Also, what’s your take on building products that are deep in a specific vertical versus those that cover a broader set of use cases but with less depth? Which strategy would result in a stronger competitive moat?

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