Is Your Business Defensible?

19 paths to greater product and business defensibility.

So you chanced upon a serious customer pain point and built a solution that costs less to deliver than customers are willing to pay for it.

Great!

You effectively promoted it, and you’ve now got a high-margin business that’s growing fast.

Congratulations!

Most would-be entrepreneurs never make it this far.

But…

Beware the barbarians at the gate.

Copycats are sure to follow, and unless your product is defensible — you’ve built some kind of moat or fortress that makes it difficult for said barbarians to penetrate the city walls, your market share could evaporate as quickly as it appeared.

Is your business model defensible?

This is a key question posed by most venture capitalists, so much so that in Bill Gurley’s iconic article on 10x revenue business, three of the ten traits listed had to do with defensibility.

Below you’ll find 18 ways products and/or businesses can become more defensible, along with a rating of how effective each is.

I’ve differentiated between product defensibility and business defensibility — the latter in reference to…