A builder's field guide

Zero to Moat

43 startup concepts every founder should know — illustrated and explained — then put to work analysing four real products.

Read the theory Explore the projects

43: concepts
8: parts
4: case studies
47: diagrams

The map

Seven parts that follow the arc of building a company — from sizing a market to defending it, to the numbers that decide how long you have.

Part I

Sizing the Opportunity

Before you build anything, you owe yourself one honest answer: how big is this, really? These four ideas take a vague hunch about a market and turn it into a number you can plan against — and a foothold small enough to actually win.

Part II

Customer & Product

A market is an abstraction; a customer is a person with a problem. This part zooms all the way in — who exactly you're for, the job they're hiring you to do, the smallest thing you can ship to find out, and how you know when it's working.

Part III

Business Models

Two products can solve the same problem and be utterly different companies, because the shape of the business — who builds value, who captures it, and how it compounds — is a choice. These four shapes recur again and again.

Part IV

Strategy & Positioning

Where you choose to compete often matters more than how hard you compete. These four ideas are about positioning — whether to fight in a crowded sea or open a new one, whether to define a category, and whether the world is ready for you yet.

Part V

Moats & Defensibility

Finding open water is the easy part; keeping it is the hard part. A moat is whatever makes your advantage compound and stops a well-funded copycat from simply doing the same thing. This is where good companies become durable ones.

Part VI

Money & Fundraising

Strategy buys you a destination; money buys you the time to get there. This part is the financial vocabulary — the stages of raising, the instrument that does it, and the three numbers that decide how long you have left.

Part VII

Growth & Metrics

Acquisition gets a customer in the door; these numbers tell you whether keeping them is worth more than it cost to win them. This is the arithmetic that separates a business from a burn rate.

Part VIII

The Founder's Canon

Ten books every founder should read — and the ideas they add to this guide. These are the base concepts the earlier parts didn't already cover; each names the book it comes from.

Four products, run through the book

The vocabulary earns its keep here. Each project is held up against the concepts — where they apply, where they don't, and where the founder chose not to play a given game.

Case Study 01 · Developer tooling

local-review

A local, bring-your-own-key CLI that runs your git diff past several LLMs in parallel and merges their findings into one review — no SaaS, no telemetry, no signup.

Shipping · v0.17.2 · pre-1.0AI code review (local-first)

Case Study 02 · Brand intelligence

FBrandScore

Paste a company URL and get a 0–100 brand score, blended from five leading LLMs across sentiment, visibility, and reviews — in about sixty seconds.

v1.0.0 · launch-imminentAI brand intelligence / "AEO"

Case Study 03 · Team-building SaaS

CoffeeSlack

A multi-tenant Slack app that pairs teammates for recurring, randomized 1:1 "random coffee" chats on a cadence each workspace chooses.

Public beta · free for all (beta mode)Slack-native team-building bot

Case Study 04 · Creative utility

Alotno

A fast, fully on-device tool that converts PNGs into clean vectors (SVG, PDF, EPS, DXF) and optimized WebP — shipping as a web app and a native desktop app from one Rust engine.

Shipping · web + signed macOS appRaster-to-vector conversion utility

Vocabulary you can act on.

Start with the theory, or jump straight to a product and see the ideas in the wild.

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