levelsio lists every moat he has left, with prices
levelsio says he is scrambling again, this time to chase whatever AI companies cannot absorb: data APIs, an X audience he says pays about $15K a month, a 187,279 person list, merch, hotels and hardware. He also cut his community price from $99 to $1.
Read the whole week in one goMarc Lou says MailCheap hit three-figure MRR in days
Real money
levelsio posts his moat list: $15K a month from X, $1K from merch
levelsio published an inventory of every moat he thinks survives AI and what he is doing to each one: proprietary data, community, audience, physical, capital. He says his X audience pays about $15K a month, his blog list and Telegram total 187,279 people, merch does about $1K a month, and the Nomads data API runs $2,490 to $9,990 a year.
I am now scrambling to chase any remaining moats
Stolen playbooks
levelsio adds a "tell me why you won't join" box at checkout
levelsio put a prompt under his checkout reading "Don't want to join? Tell me why", which opens a modal for the answer. He did it after Paul Graham said founders should ask non-buyers what they would buy instead. No results yet, he shipped it the same day.
If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy.
What changed under us
dax says he finally understands who missed the early internet
dax says he used to wonder why most people missed out on building early internet products, and now he gets it. His answer is the number of people fiddling with their custom agent setup instead of using the tool to make something. No numbers behind it, just the observation.
so many people fiddling around with "my custom agent setup" and so few using this miracle of a tool to actually do anything