Essay
Distribution Is the Last Moat
When anyone can build the product, the only thing left to defend is how people find it.
For most of the last twenty years, the hard part of a startup was building the thing. You needed engineers, money to pay them, and a year before anyone could use what you made. Distribution mattered, but the product was the wall that kept competitors out.
That wall is coming down. A small team with good taste and a few agents can now ship in a weekend what used to take a quarter. The same is true for the team across the street, and for the three teams you haven’t heard of yet. When building gets cheap, products converge. Features get copied before the launch post finishes loading.
What’s left to defend
What doesn’t get cheaper is attention. There are still only so many hours in a founder’s feed, so many seats at a dinner, so many accounts a buyer trusts enough to follow. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that own a path to those people: an audience, a community, a channel nobody else has figured out yet.
The product gets you in the conversation. Distribution decides whether anyone hears you.
This is what The Last Moat is about. Every week, one piece on how startups actually get found now: launching on X, seeding theme pages, running events that people talk about, and working with the operators who have become media companies on LinkedIn.
What you’ll get here
Four kinds of pieces, one at a time:
- Essays that argue one idea about distribution.
- Playbooks you can run this week.
- Teardowns of launches and campaigns that worked, and a few that didn’t.
- Interviews with the founders and growth leads doing it.
No roundups, no link dumps. If a piece doesn’t change how you’d spend next week, it doesn’t go out.
