Founders love to talk about their moat in terms of what the product does: the algorithm, the integration, the clever workflow. Most of that is copyable within a release cycle or two. The moats that actually hold up are rarely about the feature at all.
Features get copied. Habits don't.
A clever feature is visible and imitable within a release cycle. What's harder to copy is the routine a product has quietly become part of: the moment in someone's week where reaching for your product is now the default.
That's a slower moat to build, and a much sturdier one.
Ask what becomes awkward without you
A useful test: what would a user have to relearn, rebuild or lose if the product disappeared tomorrow? The bigger that answer, the more defensible the position, regardless of how replicable the underlying feature set is.
What this looks like in practice
Compare two note-taking apps with near-identical features. One is where a team happens to keep its meeting notes, linked to a dozen other documents, searchable across two years of history. The other is functionally similar but new. A competitor can match the feature list in a quarter. They can't shortcut the two years of accumulated, linked, trusted history sitting inside the first one, and that's the part the team would actually miss.
In plain terms
A “moat” just means the reasons a customer doesn't leave, even if a cheaper or shinier competitor shows up. It's tempting to think that reason is a feature: something impressive the product does. Usually it's simpler: the customer has built a habit and a history around the product, and untangling that is more effort than it's worth. That's harder to build than a feature, and much harder for anyone else to copy.