No moat? Your growth gets copied.
A moat? You earn pricing power.

Quick test: What’s hardest for a competitor to replicate in 12 months?
#defensiblemoat #startupstrategy #competitiveadvantage

Five common moats:
1. Cost advantage — you profit at prices others can’t
2. Switching costs — leaving is painful
3. Intangibles — brand, patents, proprietary data
4. Network effects — every new user increases value
5. Efficient scale — the market only supports one or two players

Follow SparkLaunch for next week’s briefing. #startups #founders #buildinpublic #fundraising #product

But here’s the founder warning: platform risk can still kill the model. Setapp Mobile is shutting down in the EU.

Your takeaway: build distribution you can control, keep burn disciplined, and ship AI features that save time immediately.

First principles thinking is the opposite:
“What’s actually true here?”
“What are the constraints?”
“If we had to rebuild this from scratch, what would we do?”

#firstprinciples #problemsolving #innovation #entrepreneurship #startups

Most everyday thinking is analogy thinking:
“This is how companies like us do it.”
“This is how it’s been done before.”
“This worked last time, so we’ll repeat it.”

In modern problem-solving language, it looks like this:
Don’t start with solutions.
Start with what must be true.
Then design from there.

A “first principle” is essentially a foundational starting point: a basic proposition you treat as true for the purpose of reasoning. In philosophy and science, that’s the idea behind “first principles” work. Start at the foundation rather than stacking guesses on top of guesses

If you are in consumer or hardware: treat cash conversion cycle and inventory risk like existential product requirements
If you are in AI: retention, incentives, and product clarity are not later work, they are the moat
#startups #entrepreneurship #fundraising #productdevelopment

SparkLaunch Founder Briefing:
If you are fundraising: pitch a wedge that turns AI into measurable outcomes, not a generic platform
If you are building: use agentic tools to compress time-to-prototype, then invest early in reliability and security.

Launches
1) Digg opened its public beta as a Reddit-style community product
2) Anthropic launched Cowork inside the Claude Desktop app
3) Replit launched Mobile Apps on Replit
4) Flow AQ launched to show multi-day air-quality forecasts with iPhone first

Big failures
1) Hooked Foods filed for bankruptcy after years in plant-based alternatives
2) Food52 declared bankruptcy with more than $25M in debt and proposed $6.5M offer from America’s Test Kitchen
3) Meta reportedly cut about 10% of Reality Labs and planned studio shutdowns

Fundraising
1) Merge Labs surfaced with a reported $250M seed and OpenAI as the largest check.
2) depthfirst raised a $40M Series A for “AI-native” security.
3) Converge Bio raised a $25M Series A in AI drug discovery.

Series funding is about matching capital to milestones. Raise when you’re ready, not just because you can!

Series A is about scale. Investors want repeatable growth, strong metrics, and clear go-to-market strategy

Series B helps you grow fast. Bigger teams, new markets, and operational maturity

Series C and beyond fuel expansion, acquisitions, or preparation for IPO or acquisition

Pre-seed is about proving the idea. Early users, a prototype, and a clear problem. This money usually comes from angels or early believers.

Seed funding is for building real traction. You’re hiring your first team, shipping product, and showing early revenue or growth.