It was never the code

Everyone thinks they can “vibecode” a Slack competitor in an afternoon.

Yet no one is trying to compete with Slack right now (unless you’re Microsoft or Jack Dorsey etc.)

Why is that?

Clearly, the moat isn’t the code.

It’s something bigger than that. More amorphous. More difficult to produce.

It’s the network.

The “people like us do things like this” factor.

Perhaps the code was never the moat, or the onramp, or the eagerness to try something new.

Perhaps the moat was an experience so novel, special, unique, and fit for you, that you had to tell the others.

Perhaps it always was.