Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | Aug 21, 2025 | FIV #90

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• 10 habits that separate millionaires from everyone else

• How to build (and keep) your moat in the AI era

• A mini-masterclass in prompting + early access to Founderland

QUICK LINKS

🌱 Personal development. 10 habits that separate millionaires from everyone else.

🎨 Branding. How to world-build on social media.

✍️ Content creation. Everything you need to know about text placement in 15 seconds.

🚀 Company-building. Understanding business development.

🏅Leadership. What does it take to be a great manager? The 8 essential skills.

🤖 How to Keep Your Moat in the AI Era

AI has blown the doors wide open.

Building used to be the hard part—coding, design, content, shipping. Now? Spin up a logo in minutes, ship an MVP in a weekend, and write a landing page while you make coffee. AI has turned the hard things into the easy things.

That’s the good news.

The bad news? If anyone can spin up features at lightning speed, what’s left that’s defensible?

The answer: moats. Not just the technical or purely proprietary kind. The creative, human, and cultural moats that even the sharpest AI can’t wash away.

Here’s how to build them—even if you’re solo or scrappy.

What AI Melts (and Fast)

Let’s start with what doesn’t last.

• 🪞 Feature parity → Gone. Whatever you build, someone else can replicate.

• ⏱️ Speed-to-market → Irrelevant. AI has leveled the playing field.

• 💤 Generic content → Instantly forgettable. Everyone can publish faster now.

If your “edge” is efficiency, AI erases it.

Which means your moat can’t just be what you build. It has to be what only you can create—and how you protect it.

The Creative Moat Playbook

1. Voice + Storytelling

AI can mimic tone, but it can’t live your story.

Sara Blakely built Spanx into a billion-dollar brand by telling her personal story (cutting pantyhose with scissors and bootstrapping with $5,000).

Your journey, your point of view, your quirks—that’s the uncopyable part.

• 💡 Share your why (not just your what).

• 🔥 Make your positioning opinionated, even polarizing.

• 📖 Document in public. People buy into people, not features.

When your audience knows your story, competitors become background noise.

2. Brand Personality & Aesthetic

AI can spit out logos, but it can’t curate a world.

Moats live in recognition. That little twinge of “I know whose this is” before the name shows up.

• 🦅 Pick a weird, ownable style. Liquid Death did it with water, of all things—proof that personality itself can be a moat.

• 🖌️ Codify your “brand quirks” (color, tone, humor).

• 🚩 Anchor yourself to something bigger than the product—like a cultural aesthetic or movement.

AI can clone content, but it can’t clone culture.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Use Canva’s Brand Hub to lock down your fonts, colors, and logo variations so every piece of content looks unmistakably you + create a Custom GPT in ChatGPT and train it on your brand voice and copy style.

3. Community & Belonging

AI builds tools. People build tribes.

If customers feel like insiders, they won’t jump ship just because someone launches a cheaper knockoff.

• 🌱 Start small: a Slack group, a Discord server, a WhatsApp thread.

• 🔑 Give early customers access, sneak peeks, and recognition.

• 🤝 Make co-creation part of your DNA. Notion empowered a legion of template-makers who spread the word for free.

Communities aren’t scalable in the same way features are—and that’s the point. They’re sticky because they’re human.

4. Creative Formats & Experiences

AI is great at content. But experiences stick.

Think beyond the feed:

• ✨ Add signature quirks to onboarding

• 🎉 Throw playful events or challenges

• 🎨 Slip in Easter eggs or personal touches

AI can generate, but it can’t surprise the way a human can. Experiences turn products into stories customers retell…like Cards Against Humanity’s absurd stunts—half marketing, half folklore—that no AI could have engineered.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Want to surprise customers with high-production moments without a Hollywood budget? Runway can generate cinematic video content, and Descript makes editing podcasts or videos as easy as editing a doc. Together, they let a scrappy founder punch above their creative weight.

5. Protecting Your Creative Work (Books, Shows, Content, Products)

Here’s where founders often forget: your creativity is a moat, but it’s fragile if you don’t protect it. Especially if you’ve built it with AI’s help.

• ©️ Copyrights: Yes, you can protect AI-assisted work if you provide meaningful human authorship and direction. Document drafts and edits.

• ™️ Trademarks: File early for names, logos, and taglines. It’s inexpensive and one of the highest-leverage moves you can make.

• 📜 Licensing: Be clear on terms if you use AI art, stock, or training data. Avoid messy disputes down the line.

• 📂 Proof of Creation: Keep timestamps, drafts, prompts, and revisions. They prove your authorship if challenged.

AI helps you create faster. But paperwork makes it durable.

Think of Disney: Mickey is one of the most aggressively defended assets on Earth.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: File trademarks and copyrights quickly through LegalZoom if you don’t have a lawyer on retainer. For creators worried about AI-driven knockoffs, MarqVision uses AI to scan marketplaces and flag infringing content or products.

6. Cultural Capital

AI can replicate style, but it’s not tuned to cultural nuance the way you are.

That’s your edge. Attach your product to something bigger:

• ✊ A movement

• 👥 A subculture

• 📈 A trend or zeitgeist

Supreme turned scarcity + subculture into cultural gravity. Patagonia built a moat out of values so strong that customers wear their beliefs on their backs.

Do it authentically, and you’ll own mindshare in a way AI clones never can.

Founder-to-founder tip: Exploding Topics surfaces rising trends before they go mainstream.

The Creative Moat Audit

Ask yourself:

• 📖 Do customers know my story and what I stand for?

• 🎨 Is my brand instantly recognizable—or interchangeable?

• 🫂 Do my users feel like members of a tribe or just buyers?

• 🛡️Have I protected my creative work (copyright, trademark, proof of creation)?

• 🌊 Am I tied to a cultural current bigger than my product?

If you’re shaky on any of these, that’s where to start.

A 30-Day Creative Moat Sprint

• Week 1: Write and share your “Why us, why now” story.

• Week 2: Codify your brand quirks—voice, visuals, tone—and file one trademark.

• Week 3: Launch a micro-community (even 10 customers). Reward them with insider perks.

• Week 4: Ship one bold creative artifact (content, event, surprise) and document it—drafts, timestamps, and copyright filing if relevant.

Measure success by mentions, referrals, replies, insider engagement—and whether your work feels like it belongs to you.

Closing: Human + Protected

AI is not the moat-killer. It’s the moat builder.

Use AI to speed the grunt work, but don’t confuse output with defensibility. Your moat is your story, your brand, your tribe, your creativity. And yes, sometimes it’s the legal stamp that proves you own what you made.

Creativity makes you uncopyable. Protection makes it durable. AI makes it scalable.

That’s the trifecta founders should be aiming for.

Sean’s Pick of The Week

MidJourney’s Explore Page = Free Masterclass in Prompting

MidJourney just dropped video—and while that’s exciting, the real gem I want to share this week is a prompting tip that will change how you use it.

Most people struggle with getting their prompts just right, but there’s a built-in hack hardly anyone talks about.

It’s called the Explore page, and it lets you browse a feed of images and videos that other users have made.

The magic? You can click on anything you like and see the exact prompts they used.

I actually used this trick to make the 5-second Founderland video above.

👉 FYI: Founderland is where founders have fun and deals get done. If that sounds like your kind of place, sign up and come join us.

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