Peter Levels: Why SaaS Lost Its Moat

Somewhere on the internet right now, a stranger is deciding whether to pay money to sit in an empty chair at a wedding they were never invited to. A new website lets people buy tickets to someone else's ceremony, and it already claims 20,000 users (01:05). One upcoming event lists its dress code as "enchanted woodland." Nobody on this week's roundup from Ben Levy, Sam, and Sean wants to go. But the idea is a useful door into the episode, because almost everything that follows is really about the same question: what makes a thing worth paying for, and what makes a business worth building, once anyone can copy the surface of it in a weekend.

Take men's skincare. A "looks-maxing" influencer named Clavicular wants to start a line, and the hosts immediately reach for the template that already worked: Bryan Johnson. Johnson, the anti-aging entrepreneur known for publicizing his own biomarkers, has turned his supplement brand Blueprint into roughly $40 million a year in revenue (05:12). The wait list for his far more expensive, roughly $1 million per year longevity protocol has reportedly generated over $100 million in potential pipeline, with no paid marketing at all (05:15). The lesson the hosts draw is not that supplements are a good business. It's that attention, applied consistently, becomes its own kind of asset. The counterexample is Congo Brands, the company behind Alani Nu and, with Logan Paul and KSI, Prime. Its founders are, by design, almost invisible online; the only photo of one of them online shows a guy in a yellow shirt in front of a garage (07:09). Two very different paths to the same outcome: one built on a famous face, one built on staying a stranger.

Where the Moats Went

The sharpest idea in the episode comes from Peter Levels, a Bali-based solo developer the hosts clearly admire. Levels recently wrote that he no longer believes in SaaS, short for software as a service, the subscription-app model that built much of the last decade of startups. "I no longer believe in SaaS. I now only believe in these moats," he wrote, listing proprietary data or content, network effects, audience or distribution, capital-intensive physical operations, and regulatory capture (20:36). The reasoning is simple: if an AI model can rebuild most of what your app does in an afternoon, the app itself was never the defense. Something else has to be.

The hosts push on this rather than just repeating it. One points out that only about 2% of Americans currently pay for a ChatGPT or Claude subscription (22:06), which suggests AI adoption, and AI's disruptive bite, is still early. Another argues that network effects, the dynamic where a product gets more useful as more people join it, might be the strongest of Levels' moats, since mediocre products like Craigslist or eBay have survived for decades purely because everyone already uses them (23:05). A third raises Amazon: its moat isn't the website, it's the physical and logistical machine behind it, a machine that gets cheaper to run as robotics improves, while customer demand for stuff showing up at the door stays constant or grows (23:54). The underlying point, made almost in passing, is that Peter Levels himself is proof the theory works at a smaller scale. He reportedly earns $2 million to $3 million a year as a one-person operation (25:35), working from his laptop, which the hosts suggest is a more realistic aspiration for most people than chasing a billion-dollar company.

The same logic for distribution shows up twice more. Elon Musk's new Tesla Roadster, built with SpaceX rocket boosters that let it drive upside down using downward air suction, is less a car than a demonstration of belief (08:43). And Musk's separate plan to give one SpaceX share to every child in America, an estimated 72 million kids worth about $10 billion total, functions less like philanthropy and more like a distribution strategy for loyalty (14:31). Sean describes watching this play out inside his own family: a relative who meant to buy $3,000 of SpaceX stock accidentally bought roughly $500,000 worth, and instantly became the household's most obsessive SpaceX analyst, tracking every Starship launch (15:21, 15:40). Ownership, in other words, is its own kind of moat against indifference.

The Fear Underneath the Fast Company

If the first half of the episode is about structural advantage, the second half is about the person running the company. The hosts recount a conversation with James Currier, a Stanford lecturer and startup advisor who built something he calls the "speed talk." Founders think they're moving fast, he tells them; they almost never are. His method starts with a single question: what is slowing you down? The answer, in his experience, is nearly always fear.

"The highest point of leverage in every business is the founder's psychology, and the highest point of leverage within the founder's psychology is what are they afraid of and what are they avoiding." — Sean, My First Million co-host, recounting advisor James Currier's framework [34:23]

Currier has reportedly been paid in equity for this kind of coaching, including a 1% stake from the resale marketplace Poshmark in exchange for growth advice that turned out to be mostly psychological (34:14). His related observation is about what he calls the "F it moment,": the point where a founder realizes they're out of cash or out of options, and suddenly starts making faster, cleaner, less precious decisions (34:33). Fear, in this reading, isn't a weakness to manage around. It's the actual bottleneck in most companies, hiding behind whatever the spreadsheet says is the problem.

The same episode offers a smaller, gentler version of self-management, borrowed from writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss. Ferriss reportedly blocks about 45 minutes a day for a creative task unrelated to work: drawing, music, open brainstorming, whatever. There's no goal to finish or monetize it.

"I just do something creative. Could be drawing, could be music, could be, like, brainstorming, could be whatever." — Sean, My First Million co-host, describing Tim Ferriss's creative gym habit [39:48]

The idea, as Ferriss frames it, is that the activity charges a kind of mental battery, and that charge carries into other kinds of work the way a full phone battery powers whatever it's plugged into next. It's a small, almost domestic idea sitting next to a conversation about $10 billion stock giveaways and AI moats, but it belongs in the same episode, because both are about where energy and advantage actually come from, and how rarely it's the thing everyone's staring at.

The episode closes on the smallest business of the day, and in some ways the clearest proof of its own argument. Ben Levy's brother, a ten-year real estate agent in Phoenix who listens to the show every week, launched a pest control company called Howdy Pest. He wrapped a truck, built a simple website using mostly AI tools, hired a technician, and booked $1,000 of revenue in his first week (46:31). Nothing about killing roaches is new or defensible on its own. What Sean and Sam point to is the packaging: taking an unglamorous local service and dressing it in the same clean, friendly branding usually reserved for direct-to-consumer startups (47:50). It isn't a moat in Peter Levels' sense. There's no proprietary data, no network effect, no regulatory wall. But it's a reminder that most of what gets discussed in this episode, the giveaways, the influencer math, the founder fear, eventually has to show up somewhere as ordinary as a wrapped truck in a driveway, trying to get someone to pick up the phone.