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Found 9 Skills
Warren Buffett said he looks for "economic castles protected by unbreachable moats." A moat is a sustainable competitive advantage that protects your business from competitors. Without a moat, success attracts competition that erodes your margins to zero. This skill covers identifying, building, and deepening moats. Network effects, switching costs, brand, scale economies, and the rarer moats like regulatory capture and counter-positioning. Use when "moat, defensibility, competitive advantage, network effects, switching costs, barrier to entry, unfair advantage, protect from competition, sustainable advantage, winner take all, flywheel, lock-in, moat, defensibility, strategy, network-effects, switching-costs, competitive-advantage, seven-powers" mentioned.
Moat analysis for products, companies, open-source projects, careers, and communities. Use when asking why something wins, whether an edge survives imitation or substitution (including AI commoditization), which advantages form a coherent strategy stack, or when another skill needs competitive-advantage vocabulary.
Evaluate the source, strength, sustainability and weakening risks of a company's competitive advantages, and determine whether the moat truly exists and can be converted into returns. Suitable for scenarios such as long-term stock initial screening, high-quality company research, and competitive barrier judgment.
Apply the Resource-Based View (Barney, 1991) and VRIO framework to evaluate whether a firm's resources and capabilities confer sustained competitive advantage. Use this skill when the user needs to assess internal resources for strategic value, determine if a competitive edge is sustainable, audit resource portfolios for VRIO criteria, or when they ask 'what makes our advantage sustainable', 'which resources matter most', or 'can competitors replicate this'.
Apply Porter's Value Chain Analysis to identify competitive advantage sources within an organization's activities. Use this skill when the user needs to find where value is created or lost in their operations, analyze cost structure by activity, optimize internal processes, or identify outsourcing candidates — even if they say 'where do we make money' or 'which activities should we keep in-house'.
Distills a person's or company's strengths, experiences, and obsessions down to their one or two VOTERS — the decisive, idiosyncratically extreme traits that win the contest because customers who value them accept every other trade-off. Runs each candidate through a hard gauntlet: extremity earned through obsession (not mere competence), rarity among peers, decisiveness (name the weaknesses it overpowers), and reverberation (it must force decisions in product, pricing, and market). Caps the answer at two, records survivors in VOTERS.md — plus the near-miss 'special strengths' to deploy — and delivers the honest zero-voter verdict when nothing is extreme yet. Takes a self-portrait file (M-numbered), strengths or keystones charts, or a live capture. Load when the user asks what makes them special, what to bet the strategy on, their unfair advantage or superpower, or to 'find our voters.' Do NOT load to build the full self-portrait (the previous step) or to design the whole strategy — this file feeds it.
Apply the Dynamic Capabilities framework (Teece et al., 1997) — sensing, seizing, and transforming — to analyze how firms adapt, integrate, and reconfigure competences in rapidly changing environments. Use this skill when the user needs to explain why some firms sustain advantage while others decline, evaluate organizational agility, distinguish operational from strategic capabilities, or when they ask 'how do we stay competitive as the market shifts', 'why did this firm fail to adapt', or 'what capabilities do we need to build'.
Identifies a product's marketing advantages and develops strategies to leverage them for growth. Use when the user wants to identify marketing advantages, asks 'what are my marketing advantages,' mentions PLG, virality, network effects, distribution strategies, or wants to know how to market based on product strengths.
Analyze relationship between profitability and market share. Use for competitive advantage assessment, scale economies analysis, and strategy validation.