Time in Market: From Competitive Advantage to Organizational Drag

“Time in market” could be the biggest MOAT today or the biggest drag in mid-market and enterprise organizations.

When product development and content marketing are no longer a competitive advantage (vibe coding and high-scale automated content campaigns), the two core pillars I’ve been preaching continuously were:

1. Brand
2. Private data

Brand names = trust. Everyone could publish content on virtually any topic, including 14 year olds on surgery or rocket science, with a single prompt.

What trusted companies and individuals bring to the table is precisely why we shouldn’t risk our brands, personal and professional, for quick wins and shortcuts.

And with loads of scraped data from LLMs, individual data sources (market reports, portfolio data analysis, individual form submissions and requests) are the secret sauce to many. This is why we have Semrush or Ahrefs for example.

One addition to this mix is:

TIME IN MARKET

I assumed it’s part of brand previously, but it isn’t. Doing the same thing over and over again is accumulated experience. Shifting gears fast is an important aspect of adaptability, but shifting ON TOP OF what is proven is progress and an incremental improvement.

So a startup that has been solving a problem for a year is still ahead of a vibe coded product from last week.

Where this goes wrong?

Enterprise companies still charging for seats, or 3rd party providers still charging premium for integrations.

I can point to at least 5 products that don’t have HubSpot or Salesforce integrations in their $2K – $4K/year plans, and only introduce them in the higher tiers. This actually downplays the value of a proven product and incentivizes alternatives, especially custom ones, when added costs keep piling up.

Time in market is an advantage, unless you end up in a place where it causes more harm than good.