You only have a moat until your customer learns to prompt.

AI isn't killing your software. It's stress-testing your moat.

The ones that hold up share four things — every one a reason the customer can't take the work back in-house.

The Durability Stack

Four layers. Foundation up. Each one a reason reclaiming is harder than it looks.

01
Encoded domain knowledge.
Not that you know the domain — that you've structured it into something the customer would have to rebuild from scratch and keep current as the rules move.
02
Regulatory standing.
Taking it back means owning the risk of getting it wrong. Few customers insource a liability they can offload.
03
First-party data.
The longer they use you, the more the data compounds — and leaving means rebuilding it from zero.
04
Attention & distribution.EMERGING
Even when the capability is replicable, being the default channel isn't.

“One question sorts a durable asset from an exposed one: what could this customer rebuild in-house in eighteen months — and what couldn't they touch?”

How the stack reads a real company →
Mario Lenz

Mario Lenz

Two decades in product and technology leadership in B2B SaaS, most recently as CPO / CPTO, with a growth-equity-backed exit behind me.

I work with investors and the companies they back — on product strategy, technology diligence, and where software durability actually comes from.

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