Stop Building Apps. Start Building Moats. (An 8-Year Autopsy of a Founder’s Soul)
An 8-year founder has built dozens of apps, watched his one success get crushed by copycats, and is now repeating the same build-first-validate-later pattern with an AI prompt marketplace. The problem isn’t motivation or skill — it’s the absence of a system for learning from failure. Distribution is the product. Code is the commodity. Without a moat, being first is just a head start on someone else’s success.