Basically, what I’m trying to say is: software is cheap to produce now, but not necessarily easy to customize.

It seems like everyone is honing in on distribution and capital as the moat. We have all these vibe-coding platforms and a flood of applications that are 90% there but not quite finished. Then everyone is trying to get that last 10% and capture the value there.

The people winning so far are mostly agencies, right? Or hackers going door to door and selling custom solutions. But what’s killing them is the shenanigans around customer acquisition, growth hacking and stuff like that. I think startups promising things like 'your agentic CMO in a box' are a symptom of this, and personally not yet fully convinced on their utility, as much respect as I have for many cracked founders selling shovels.

I don’t know if anyone saw Outbid.lol, the pay-to-rank leaderboard that just went viral on X and immediately spawned a brigade of copycats, but it made me really think: are marketplaces going to actually be more defensible now than pure software?

Because if code is abundant, then yeah, the moat has moved to the distribution side. But maybe the other moat is making software really, really, really good.

If slop is 90% good, we should be trying to detect that slop and build ways for humans to step in and capture that last 10% of value. That could help grow the economy, ultimately, and it could work worldwide.

So I guess my first question is: does this thesis make any sense? I’m open to critique.

And my second question is: can we actually use AI to preemptively detect slop, then hand it off to humans to fix?

I’ve started hacking on this (ironically a bit slop right now as it is just a landing page that explains my thesis and question in more detail), feel free to check out https://www.dontshipslop.com and I'd love to hear diverse perspectives on this question re: moat of marketplaces in an era of software slop.

P.S If any crypto folks would be open to teaching me more about marketplaces, I'd love to chat. I guess the utopian vision that kicked off this question is the tantalizing prospect of democratizing software development agencies with a marketplace and escrow model, which, as much as I find crypto’s predatory bits annoying, is actually a great use case in theory for a community or DAO to run with.

Ask HN: Is there a stronger moat in marketplaces in the age of SaaS AI Slop?