Dharmesh Shah argues for building startups with natural moats like network effects, even though they're harder to grow initially. The long-term defensive advantage is worth the slow early traction required to reach critical mass.
How important is it to consider picking ideas that have natural moats? So I think it's super useful if you can, if you can design a natural moat into the business or find a variation of the idea that has that natural moat. It may make it marginally harder in the early years because a lot of those moats, if you're looking for things like network effects, have a certain critical mass that's required that you have to sort of hit before the true network value starts to kick in. But it's worth calories at least trying to think of an idea that, that has a natural moat to it.
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