The Advantage You Can’t Generate
A few years ago, building something useful was a meaningful barrier to entry. You needed technical knowledge, capital, specialized people, or enough time to figure out how to assemble the pieces yourself. Those constraints didn’t guarantee a good business, but they did provide a certain amount of protection. If you could build something your competitors couldn’t easily reproduce, you had an advantage worth defending.
David C. Baker, author of The Business of Expertise, recently explored this idea in his excellent piece, “Crumbling Moats.” He traces how the competitive advantages that once protected professional services firms have gradually disappeared, from geographic boundaries to specialized tools and technical capabilities. His larger point is that businesses have repeatedly mistaken temporary barriers for lasting advantages. AI may be accelerating that process more dramatically than anything we’ve seen before.
The question, then, is what remains defensible when the tools and capabilities that once distinguished your business become widely available. Baker makes a compelling case for specialized expertise and the trust that comes from demonstrated judgment. I’d argue that the relationships a business builds around those qualities may be just as important. Expertise gives people a reason to listen. Consistently delivering on that expertise gives them a reason to return.
A capable person with the right tools can now prototype software, produce marketing materials, develop educational content, and assemble surprisingly sophisticated digital products without the infrastructure those things once required. The cost of creating has fallen, and the speed at which competitors can respond has increased. That’s an extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurs, but it also introduces a problem that I think we’re only beginning to appreciate: when building becomes easier for everyone, building alone stops being much of a differentiator.
Consider two businesses selling essentially the same service. Both have attractive websites, competent technology, useful information, and persuasive marketing. One has been operating for years, has helped customers solve difficult problems, maintains an active community, and has developed a reputation for doing what it promises. The other launched last Tuesday with a polished brand, an AI-generated content strategy, and a product that looks remarkably similar. From a distance, the differences may not be obvious. To a customer preparing to spend real money, however, they can be enormous.
That’s because the customer isn’t simply evaluating what the product does. They’re evaluating the likelihood that the business will deliver, what happens when something goes wrong, and whether the people behind the promise can be relied upon. A convincing sales page can describe those qualities. It can’t establish a history of demonstrating them.
This is where I think the economics get particularly interesting. We’ve spent years treating audience building, customer support, and community management as functions that serve the business. Marketing brings people in. Support keeps them happy. Community encourages engagement. But there’s a case to be made that the relationships created through those activities are becoming part of the underlying asset itself. An audience that trusts you gives you a way to introduce new products, recover from mistakes, and remain relevant even when the original offering becomes less distinctive.
Of course, attention isn’t the same as trust. A large email list can be indifferent. A busy online community can produce very little commercial value. And a recognizable personal brand can still be attached to a disappointing product. What matters is the history of useful interactions behind the audience, and whether that history gives people a credible reason to return.
That distinction came into focus during my recent conversation on Eggs! The Podcast with Lisa Somers, CEO of Marketplace SuperHeroes. Lisa and her brother have spent years building an education business around helping people sell physical products online. Along the way, they encountered a financial problem that would test the value of the relationships they had built. Her experience offers a particularly useful way to think about trust, not simply as something a business should aspire to, but as something that can materially affect its options when circumstances change.
A Business Built Around Its Customers
Lisa Somers didn’t follow the conventional route into executive leadership. Originally headed toward clinical psychology, she joined her brother’s growing business in an early operational role, beginning in customer support and gradually working across departments before becoming CEO and a business partner.
Today, Marketplace SuperHeroes teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to sell physical products online, including through Amazon and the live-commerce platform Whatnot. Her work spans marketing, customer education, operations, and leadership.
That background matters because Lisa’s understanding of customers developed through direct exposure to their questions, doubts, and problems. In the conversation, she describes how the company navigated approximately $1 million in debt arising from difficult business circumstances. According to Lisa, the business repaid that debt over three years through operating cash flow, without taking on additional loans to cover it.
The mechanism was especially revealing: the company had an existing audience that trusted it, and it could develop additional relevant offers for those customers. The relationships created options that might otherwise have been unavailable.
Where Trust Becomes Economic Value
Lisa's experience points to three useful ideas for founders trying to build something durable in a market where products and information are becoming increasingly easy to reproduce.
Distribution matters most when the business is under pressure.
“We have an audience, and I speak about this a lot, you know, the power of distribution.”
Lisa describes how an established customer community gave Marketplace SuperHeroes a way to respond to its debt problem. Rather than depending entirely on a new source of financing, the company developed additional products, services, and educational offers for people it already understood.
The important qualification is that an audience isn’t an unlimited source of revenue. Customers won’t keep buying simply because they’ve purchased before. The new offers still have to solve real problems, and repeatedly asking people to spend without delivering meaningful value is a good way to destroy the asset you’re relying on.
Actionable insight: For founders, the practical exercise is to examine how much of your future business depends on continuously buying attention from strangers. If your advertising stopped tomorrow, how many people could you reach directly? How many would want to hear from you? And how many have enough confidence in your judgment to consider something new?
When information is abundant, the value shifts toward implementation.
“I think in terms of what makes a good offer in in 2026 and 2027, it’s not information, that’s for sure. We have so much of that now with AI that … just having [the] information is not as valuable as it used to be.”
That observation has implications well beyond online education. When customers can access competent explanations almost instantly, selling access to explanations becomes a weaker proposition. The opportunity moves toward helping people apply what they’ve learned, avoid expensive mistakes, and achieve an outcome.
Lisa describes combining education with coaching, community, practical tools, and ongoing support. The underlying principle applies just as readily to consulting firms, software companies, agencies, and professional services. A customer may be able to obtain an answer for free, but still have a compelling reason to pay someone who understands the circumstances in which that answer will succeed or fail.
Actionable insight: The useful question is whether your offer provides something meaningfully different from information retrieval. If the primary deliverable can be replicated with a reasonably good prompt, it’s worth examining what expertise, accountability, implementation, or judgment could make the service substantially more valuable.
Relationships are difficult to accelerate.
“I think all of those things, the people who invest in trust and in relationship building will win, ultimately.”
There’s a temptation to treat trust as another part of the customer-acquisition funnel, something that can be engineered with enough content, automation, and carefully timed communication. Technology can certainly make those activities more efficient. But a relationship still develops through what happens after the first impression.
A business earns credibility by being useful when there isn’t an immediate sale to make, responding well when a customer has a problem, and delivering consistently enough that people begin to rely on it. Those interactions are not particularly glamorous. They also aren’t easily compressed into a weekend of AI-assisted production.
Actionable insight: One practical way to evaluate this is to look beyond conventional engagement metrics. Consider how frequently customers return without a paid campaign prompting them, whether they recommend you to others, how effectively problems are resolved, and whether people participate because they find genuine value in the relationship. None of those measures captures trust perfectly, but together they tell a more meaningful story than follower counts alone.
The Cost of Being Replaceable
I don’t think the lesson here is that every business needs to become a community, or that human relationships somehow make good technology unnecessary. There are plenty of markets where convenience, price, speed, and product quality will continue to determine who wins. A superior product still matters. In many cases, it matters enormously.
But when competitors can reproduce the functional elements of an offering with increasing speed, the accumulated history surrounding that offering becomes more consequential. Customers remember who helped them through a difficult decision. They remember whether the promised support materialized. They remember the company that took responsibility when something failed. Those experiences influence future decisions in ways that a feature comparison may never capture.
There is also an uncomfortable implication for businesses that have become particularly good at automation. If we remove too much human interaction in pursuit of efficiency, we may inadvertently eliminate the very experiences that give customers a reason to remain loyal. The short-term savings can look attractive while the long-term cost remains difficult to measure.
The opportunity, as I see it, is to use technology to make the business more capable while being deliberate about the relationships worth protecting. Automate the repetitive work. Make information easier to access. Build better products faster. Then use some of the capacity you’ve created to become more accessible, more responsive, and more useful to the people who depend on what you do.
The things that once protected businesses are becoming easier to reproduce. The technology, the processes, even much of the expertise that once distinguished one company from another. But there’s a difference between being able to produce the same work and having earned the confidence of the people who buy it. That confidence takes time, judgment, and a history of delivering when it matters. And as the traditional moats around our businesses continue to disappear, that history may become one of the few advantages competitors can’t simply manufacture.
Thanks for reading.
—Ryan
The Path Question
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Path Picks
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The Membership Economy — Robbie Kellman Baxter
A useful companion to this week’s discussion, particularly for businesses interested in creating relationships that extend beyond individual transactions. Baxter examines the organizational and commercial decisions behind membership-oriented businesses, including the importance of delivering continuing value rather than relying on the initial sale.
The Business of Expertise — David C. Baker
Baker makes a compelling case for building a business around specialized expertise rather than trying to compete on capabilities that anyone else can offer. He examines how positioning, accumulated experience, and the ability to exercise sound judgment create value that goes well beyond simply doing the work. It’s an especially relevant companion to this week’s discussion, and to his recent essay, Crumbling Moats. As technology makes more services and capabilities accessible to everyone, Baker’s work offers a useful perspective on what makes a business genuinely difficult to replace.
Listen In / More to Explore
Listen to the full conversation on Eggs! The Podcast.
Eggs 489: Building Trust and Community in Business with Lisa Somers
Learn more about Lisa and her work at:
Marketplace SuperHeroes or Lisa’s LinkedIn profile.
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