Two instruments, and which one applies depends on how far along you are. Before there's a result to measure, you diagnose the engine. Once there is, you test whether it holds.
Score a company raising its Series A against eight moats and it will report EXPOSED almost by construction — no data asset yet, no regulatory position, no ecosystem, no distribution. That isn't a diagnosis. It's a description of being early.
The answerable question at that stage is whether the growth mechanism compounds at all — whether something accumulates on your side and something is retained on the customer's side each time the loop turns. That's the Loop Diagnostic, and it's the question your board is already asking.
Defensibility becomes a real question later in Series A, once there's accumulated stock to measure and a funded competitor worth measuring against. Run in the wrong order, moats produce a demoralizing number instead of a decision.
The free Business Loop Diagnostic is something you run on yourself — eleven questions, result on the page, email only for the written report. The 8 Moats Diagnostic is something I run on a named company and publish. Route by stage: loops before moats, and defensibility once you're past raising the A.
Most companies describe their growth as a flywheel. Most of them have a funnel they're refilling every quarter with money. The difference is whether the output of each cycle becomes an input to the next.
A self-serve check you run on yourself. It returns which of the five loop types are actually available to you at your stage right now, and where your effort is going that can't compound. That result appears on the page immediately, with no email required. The written report — three prioritized moves, your closing-door flags, and the scoring rubric — takes an email, and I write it myself within one business day.
Something compounds on your side — the Compounding Asset — and something is retained on the customer's side. Each turn makes the next one cheaper.
The mechanism looks circular in the deck, but the output doesn't actually feed the input. Growth still costs the same per unit as it did last year.
Linear acquisition, honestly described. Not a failure — plenty of good businesses are funnels. But it changes what your growth plan can assume.
Each loop type is defined by what it retains and compounds over time — not by the channel it runs through. Co-created with Krzysztof Czubak.
Cadence bounds how many turns a loop can possibly have run — which bounds what can be observed rather than inferred. A trust loop compounding over years has barely turned inside an eighteen-month-old company, so it can only be assessed on whether it's designed to close. A user loop compounding per interaction may have turned thousands of times in the same company and is fully assessable. This is why the diagnostic takes turns elapsed rather than founding date, and why two companies at identical funding stages get different verdicts.
Compounding is measured in revolutions, not months. A PLG company at seed may have run thousands of loop turns; an enterprise company at Series B with a fourteen-month sales cycle has run three. Judging the second by elapsed time is a measurement error — the loop hasn't had enough revolutions to show.
So intake takes your go-to-market motion and your turns elapsed. Under roughly ten turns, the verdict is whether the loop is designed to close. Past fifty, we can assess whether it is observed closing.
A field-sales enterprise company cannot build a User loop, and grading it against one produces a false negative — calling a working business a funnel. Sales-led motions run on Trust and Skill. PLG runs on User and sometimes Content. Marketplaces are User loops with the short side as the binding constraint by definition.
The failure mode we design against is judging an enterprise trust loop by PLG standards.
Each claim is marked OBSERVED, INFERRED, or REQUIRES CLIENT INPUT. An early-motion company will come back mostly INFERRED, and that's honest rather than a weakness — it tells you which parts of the verdict rest on public evidence and which rest on reasoning you're entitled to argue with.
Eight moats, each scored 0–3, producing a defensibility position out of 24. Built on Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers and Gokul Rajaram's eight-moat frame, extended into a repeatable instrument.
Every moat has a way it stops working. That's the argument for scoring all eight rather than defending the one you're proudest of — the failure modes are independent, so depth in a single moat is one bad quarter away from being nothing.
The scale runs on stack depth rather than peak strength, because single moats keep failing — the data advantage a competitor buys, the regulatory position that gets deregulated, the distribution deal that ends. Depth in one moat is a wall; several reinforcing each other is a position. No single moat is durable — stack them →
Scores across all eight moats with a position and a written rationale for each. Methodology-light — you get the assessment, not the machinery behind it. No cost and no call: submit your company and I run the same instrument used on every scorecard in the published library below.
The rigorous version, with the methodology visible. Every score pressure-tested through five lenses, trajectory analysis on whether each moat is widening or eroding, two diagnostic flags, and head-to-head comparison against two to four named competitors.
A score is an opinion until it survives something. Each moat is tested against all five.
Judge the analysis before you buy it. Every teardown below uses the same instrument, the same rubric, and the same four positions — so you can check whether the reasoning holds on a company you already have an opinion about. Each one was published and argued in public.
Public analyses. Not client work. The spread is the point — an instrument returning Fortified on everything would tell you nothing. See all 15 scorecards →
A moat around a market nobody wants is an expensive wall. Diagnostics tell you whether what you've built holds; research tells you whether it's worth holding.
Most engagements start with research and use a diagnostic to pressure-test what it finds. If you're not sure which end to start from, that's a reasonable thing to spend fifteen minutes on.