Building defensible platforms in a vibe-coding world

Imagine a competitor launched a copy of your platform tomorrow, consider:

• What would remain as your solution’s core USP?

• What aspects would take them at least 12 months to copy?

• Why would your customers still choose you?

If any of the answers aren’t immediately clear, what follows are some strategies to consider.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The trick is to focus on the recurring patterns. Here’s a simple way to think about it:

Recognise the ‘Sinister Six’: These are the classic troublemakers: budget problems, lack of interest from users or the market, project partners pulling out, key people leaving, producing a poor-quality product, and finally, big delays. Just having this list is half the battle.

It’s always useful to remember that all potential customers are seeking outcomes. They want to know if the solution will improve employee capabilities, progression, retention, productivity, communities, opportunities etc.

To build an outcome-focused moat, first consider the single KPI your target customer most cares about, e.g time-to-competence, course completion rate, progression into paid work etc.

Then focus on creating the evidence that your customer will understand, e.g. baseline (before), leading indicators (during) and verified outcomes (after).

Task
Write an outcome focused case study. Is there a story for a specific learner that showcases the difference your solution has made?

A vibe-coding platform can copy your screens but not your route to market. Across the skills sector, there are multiple stakeholders: employers, training providers, local authorities, sector bodies etc. It takes time to build awareness and trust, which can’t be replicated by AI.

With these stakeholders in mind, consider how well your solution aligns with their objectives, workflow, language, and reporting needs? Can you create ‘partner versions’ with shared dashboards or co-branded case studies? As an example, in a recent conversation with a project I support, they explained how they’re exploring the development of a custom dashboard to help their partner evidence and report on the social value they deliver.

Task
Identify two stakeholders in your sector and write a 1-pager partner proposition that answers: “How does working together benefit each other and what will it enable that we can’t do alone.” Again, these are hard to copy with a simple prompt.

As evidenced through Ufi’s Strategic Partnership with the RSA and the work of the Digital Badging Commission, in the fast-changing world of skills, there’s a scarcity of trusted evidence that someone has a skill. Defensible platforms capture real-world competence that employers can access and trust.

Consider if there are opportunities you’re missing that track competence rather than just engagement. Can you record validated evidence (e.g. task-completion, peer endorsements, manager validation) in a learner portfolio, digital credential or skills wallet that can be easily shared?

Task
Define one step in your user’s journey that generates validated evidence and make it transparent and shareable. For inspiration, check out the Exemplar Badges.

Users don’t leave systems where they’ve invested time in creating a presence, reputation or continue to gain value through new opportunities and relationships, with LinkedIn being a classic example. There’s a defensible layer in the human connections that have been made (e.g. through mentors, assessors, supervisors, peers, and employers etc).

Task
Review your core user journey and consider if your solution maximises opportunities to capture these human interactions? For example, rather than automating each step, is there an opportunity to capture and share a comment between learners, training providers and employers?

Do all stakeholders have an opportunity to build their presence and visibility? E.g. posts, comments, endorsements etc.

In most settings, a vibe-coded clone is rarely deployable. Customers expect SSO, LMS integration, admin controls, security, audit, tech support etc. These aspects are outside of scope of current AI coding platforms and are harder to replicate. However, this defence can be strengthened by making a buying decision even easier to make.

Many successful Ufi projects have treated implementation as a product; creating guides for best practice implementation, standardised go-live check lists, and how-to guides/educator resources to use in the classroom.

Task
Consider the needs of everyone involved in a purchasing decision including an organisation’s IT, Finance and Support teams. Identify any areas of potential friction and identify how these can be minimised. What assets can you create that make implementation easy? These can be low cost to produce but demonstrate your knowledge of your customer’s business needs in a way that can’t be easily replicated.

In addition to seeing the capabilities of platforms like Loveable and Claude, part of the inspiration for this blog post came from the book I’m currently reading, K. J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, and like defending a city, you may need to stack these defences to compound your competitive advantage.

Start by choosing your primary moat that you build deliberately and then choose a secondary moat to provide reinforcement.