levelsio lists his moats, $15K a month from X, $1K from merch

levelsio posted an inventory of every moat he thinks survives AI and what he is doing to each one. The categories are proprietary data, network effects and community, audience and distribution, physical, capital, and regulatory, the last of which he says he is bad at and will not pursue.

@levelsio

@levelsio

X

I am now scrambling to chase any remaining moats

The numbers he attached are the interesting part. He says his X audience pays him about $15K a month, and that he has diversified it with a blog email list and Telegram subscribers that now total 187,279 people getting daily, weekly or monthly digests. Merch does about $1K a month, which he says he has not been very active on. The Nomads data API runs from $2,490 to $9,990 a year, which he launched earlier this month.

Community now costs a dollar

The move that says the most is the one with the smallest number. He cut the Nomads community from $99 to $1, and the dollar exists only to stop spam. His logic is that network effects get better with more people, so the price is a filter rather than a revenue line. Compare that to the data API sitting at four figures a year and you can see where he thinks the money is.

On the physical side he lists 8 meetups planned in the next 30 days, including fitness ones, plus Hotelist, which he argues fills a real void because booking sites suffer from rating inflation and dated filters. He is also building a 1990s retro PC mini remake, a hardware product marketed on nostalgia, in the style of the SNES Mini. His annual vibe coding games event gets about 1,000 participants and this year had over 1 million people playing the games, which he says makes AI companies happy to sponsor it.

Capital is a moat too

The capital section reads like a portfolio rather than a product plan. He says he was already heavily invested in AI companies and got more exposure through $SPCX stock from the acquisition of Cursor, that he hedged into the IB01 bond ETF in case the AI bubble pops, and that he is looking at buying more land and coastal real estate as a scarce asset post-AGI. He also says he is open to buyers for two of his sites to free up capital to invest elsewhere.

The business read is that none of this treats software as the asset. The apps feed the audience, the data and the community, and those are what he expects to still be standing. He frames it as the same scramble he did in late 2022 when he jumped from remote work and nomads to AI apps, and he is honest that he does not know if it works.