Written in your voice; clear, strategic, and rooted in Embracing Irrationality.
Why AI-Native Companies Might Actually Be More Fragile
And what the smartest builders are doing differently
Right now, there’s a flood of new SaaS tools and services firms calling themselves “AI-native.”
And on the surface, it makes sense.
They’re lean. They’re fast. They can ship new features in days.
Their cost structures are light. Their teams are small. Their UIs are… fine.
But there’s one thing most of them don’t have:
A moat.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your entire product or service can be recreated with a prompt…
You don’t have a business.
You have a countdown.
In Embracing Irrationality, I talk about the danger of over-optimizing for what’s easy or trendy.
It might feel smart in the moment, but it usually leads to fragility.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing with AI-native companies right now.
They’re interchangeable.
Their value props are thin.
Their customers have no emotional loyalty, just curiosity and convenience.
And as the cost of building AI interfaces drops to zero, the number of “good enough” competitors rises exponentially.
The irrational but smart move is to go in the opposite direction.
Go deeper into a vertical
Get obsessed with real customer pain
Add manual layers that feel “inefficient” but drive retention
Build opinionated workflows that aren’t for everyone, but perfect for someone
Integrate AI as part of the value, not the whole pitch
Because the companies that endure won’t be the ones that label themselves AI-first.
They’ll be the ones that actually solve problems, and just happen to use AI to do it.
So here’s the question I’m asking every founder right now:
If your top competitor launched your product tomorrow using the same model, the same tech stack, and the same open-source tools…
Why would a customer still pick you?
If you don’t have a clear answer, you’ve got work to do.
AI might be the engine.
But depth is still the moat.