Your Moat Is Not Technical Skill - It Is Using Your Own Product Every Day
The Biggest Advantage
The biggest advantage you can have building an AI product is not domain knowledge or technical skill. It is that you use the thing every day and know where it breaks.
Domain knowledge can be acquired. Technical skill can be hired or augmented with AI. But the intuition that comes from daily use - from hitting the same friction points your users hit, from noticing the subtle bugs that only show up after the tenth session - that cannot be replicated by reading docs or running user interviews.
Why Dogfooding Beats Research
User research tells you what people say they want. Dogfooding tells you what actually matters. These are often different things.
When you use your own AI agent to automate your daily workflows, you discover:
- Which failures are tolerable and which are not. A 5% error rate on file organization is annoying. A 5% error rate on sending emails is catastrophic.
- Where the mental model breaks. You designed the feature one way, but when you actually use it, your expectations clash with the implementation.
- What is missing from the logs. When something goes wrong, you immediately know what information you wish you had.
The AI Era Amplifies This
AI has commoditized the ability to build things quickly. Anyone can spin up a prototype in a weekend using Claude Code or similar tools. The code quality will be acceptable. The features will be plausible.
What AI cannot do is tell you which features matter. It cannot feel the frustration of a workflow that takes three extra clicks. It cannot notice that the agent handles 90% of cases perfectly but the remaining 10% are the ones you actually care about.
The Practical Moat
Use your product as your primary tool for real work. Not demo workflows - actual work with real stakes. Keep a running list of every moment where you think "this should be better." That list is your roadmap, and it is better than any competitor analysis or market research.
The founders who ship the best products are the ones who are also their most demanding users.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.