---
title: "Calculator"
description: "Twelve questions that measure the depth of your own moat."
canonical: https://moa.giglabo.com/calculator/
locale: en
---

# Calculator

> Markdown twin of https://moa.giglabo.com/calculator/ — the same content as the HTML page, a fraction of the bytes.
> Every page of this site has one: append `.md` to any URL, or `index.md` to a directory URL.
> Site structure and the full page list for agents: https://moa.giglabo.com/llms.txt

Twelve questions, four segments of one ring. Each answer deepens its segment; at the end the section is measured against the same 1–4 ruler the atlas uses — the tool a rival would need to fill it in. Nothing is stored: your answers live in the address bar, so the link is the section.

Each answer deepens its segment of the moat — twelve of them make the section.

## Pull

Whether demand compounds on its own — users, liquidity, audience.

### 1. Does each new user make the product better for everyone else?

Compounding use

1. (0) Not at all — every user is alone in the product
2. (25) Barely — a little shared content
3. (50) Inside a team, yes; across teams, no
4. (75) Yes, across the whole base
5. (100) Yes, and it accelerates — the more users, the harder it is to leave

Mechanic: [Network effects](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/1/), [Collaboration](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/11/), [Developer ecosystem](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/20/)

### 2. Where does the next customer come from?

Distribution

1. (0) I chase every one of them by hand
2. (25) Ads — the flow stops when I stop paying
3. (50) A mix of paid and word of mouth
4. (75) Mostly referrals, search and partners
5. (100) They arrive by default — I sit where the demand already forms

Mechanic: [Marketplace liquidity](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/2/), [Distribution and defaults](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/16/), [Bundling and reach](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/27/)

### 3. If you launched something new tomorrow, who would hear about it?

Audience

1. (0) Nobody I have a channel to
2. (25) A handful of personal contacts
3. (50) A mailing list of strangers
4. (75) An audience that answers back
5. (100) A community that would follow me to a new product

Mechanic: [Brand and trust](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/8/), [Community](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/21/), [Owned audience](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/32/), [Locked-in reputation](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/34/)

## Ground

What you own that a rival cannot buy — data, capital, exclusive rights.

### 4. What data do you hold that a rival cannot buy, scrape or regenerate?

Data

1. (0) None
2. (25) The same data everyone in the category has
3. (50) Some proprietary history, nothing decisive
4. (75) Years of data a newcomer cannot reconstruct
5. (100) A closed loop — usage produces data that makes the product better

Mechanic: [Proprietary data](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/3/), [Proprietary models](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/4/)

### 5. What would a rival have to spend on physical or infrastructure assets to match you?

Heavy assets

1. (0) Nothing — a laptop and a weekend
2. (25) Off-the-shelf cloud, paid monthly
3. (50) Serious infrastructure, but purchasable
4. (75) Capital that has to be raised first
5. (100) Capital and years — plants, fleets, locations, silicon

Mechanic: [Infrastructure scale](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/9/), [Hardware](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/10/), [Capital as a moat](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/22/), [Physical presence](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/31/)

### 6. What do you have exclusive access to?

Exclusive rights

1. (0) Nothing exclusive
2. (25) Partnerships anyone else can also sign
3. (50) A licence others could obtain with effort
4. (75) Rights or supply a rival cannot get today
5. (100) A cornered resource — catalogue, contract or installed base that is not for sale

Mechanic: [Content and rights](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/12/), [Cornered resource](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/18/), [Installed base](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/26/)

## Grip

How badly the customer's day breaks without you.

### 7. How long would it take a customer to replace you?

Switching cost

1. (0) An afternoon
2. (25) A few days
3. (50) Weeks, with a migration
4. (75) A quarter and a project team
5. (100) A rewrite nobody would approve

Mechanic: [Switching costs](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/5/), [Integrations](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/6/)

### 8. How broken is the customer's day without you?

Habit

1. (0) They would not notice
2. (25) A minor annoyance
3. (50) There is a workaround
4. (75) Real, visible pain
5. (100) The business stops

Mechanic: [Process power](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/19/), [Habit](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/25/), [Category leadership](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/33/)

### 9. How far ahead is your execution?

Craft

1. (0) Copyable over a weekend
2. (25) A few months of catching up
3. (50) About a year of tuning
4. (75) Years of accumulated detail
5. (100) Rivals copy the surface and get the result wrong

Mechanic: [Execution polish](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/13/), [Counter-positioning](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/17/), [Speed](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/23/)

## Leverage

What works for you without you — rules, standards, cost curves.

### 10. What must a rival obtain before they can even sell against you?

Rules

1. (0) Nothing at all
2. (25) Standard paperwork
3. (50) A certification that takes months
4. (75) Licences, audits and approvals
5. (100) A regulatory position that takes years and is rarely granted

Mechanic: [Compliance](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/7/), [Patents and IP](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/14/), [Regulatory capture](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/30/)

### 11. Does anyone build against your format, API or process?

Standard

1. (0) No one
2. (25) A couple of one-off integrations
3. (50) A small ecosystem of partners
4. (75) Partners depend on my interfaces
5. (100) My format is the standard the category has to follow

Mechanic: [Efficient scale](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/24/), [Standard and format](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/29/)

### 12. What happens to your unit cost as you grow?

Cost curve

1. (0) It rises — growth costs me money
2. (25) It stays flat
3. (50) It falls slowly
4. (75) It falls fast enough to set a price they struggle to meet
5. (100) It falls so far a newcomer cannot serve the same customer profitably

Mechanic: [Economies of scale](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/15/), [Vertical integration](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/28/), [Experience curve](https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/35/)

## Verdict

| Depth | Verdict |
|---|---|
| 1 · Shovel · weeks — months | A ditch. Everything here can be reproduced in weeks — what you have is a head start, not a moat. |
| 2 · Excavator · 1–3 years | A trench. Copying you costs a rival about a year of work, but nothing in the section deepens on its own yet. |
| 3 · Drill rig · 3–10 years | A moat. Three to ten years of digging stand between you and a copy; the work now is keeping the water in it. |
| 4 · Mine · 10+ years | A canyon. What you hold takes a decade to reproduce — the risk is no longer imitation, it is erosion. |

## Related

- HTML version of this page: https://moa.giglabo.com/calculator/
- Русский: https://moa.giglabo.com/ru/calculator/
- Atlas: https://moa.giglabo.com/
- Catalogue: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/
- Site map for agents: https://moa.giglabo.com/llms.txt