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MiniAudit· 25 minutes

Moat or Commodity? Auditing Squarespace's Q3 Content Backlog

Squarespace

Objective: Given six proposed content pieces, classify each as one of the four moat types or as commodity content using the lesson's framework, then decide which ones deserve budget.

You're a content strategist at Squarespace reviewing a proposed Q3 content calendar. The team pitched six ideas and you have budget to fund three.

Sort the six pitches by moat type, flag any that are commodity content wearing a research costume, and rank the three fundable ones.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets
FreeTag and sort the six pitches by moat type

Free, fast enough for a 6-row classification pass

The process

1 step

Step 01 of 01

The four moat types

The lesson splits moat-grade content into four inputs: product telemetry, original surveys, manual datasets, and operator expertise. Anything that isn't built on one of these is commodity content, no matter how well it's written.

Given six pitch one-liners, which are real moats and which are commodity content mislabeled as research?

Google Sheets— Import the six pitch descriptions into a sheet with a 'moat type' column.

Procedure

  1. List the six pitches with their proposed data source
  2. Tag each with one of: telemetry, survey, manual dataset, operator expertise, or 'none'
  3. Flag any pitch tagged 'none' as commodity content regardless of topic quality
Sample output
1. 'State of Website Builder Speed' - aggregated Core Web Vitals data from Squarespace sites -> TELEMETRY
2. '10 Website Design Trends for 2026' -> NONE (opinion roundup, no proprietary input)
3. 'Survey: 600 small business owners on website costs' -> SURVEY
4. 'How We Rebuilt Our Checkout Flow' (founder engineering post) -> OPERATOR EXPERTISE
5. 'Best Website Builders Compared' -> NONE (comparison, no original data)
6. 'Manual audit of 200 competitor pricing pages' -> MANUAL DATASET

Healthy

Three moat-type pitches get funded; the two 'NONE' pitches get reassigned to a lighter content track or killed.

Unhealthy

Funding 'Best Website Builders Compared' at the same budget tier as the telemetry report because it has a punchier headline.

What this means

A moat type sorts a backlog into fundable versus not, independent of how interesting the topic sounds.

So what do I do about it?

SymptomActionEffort
Two of six approved pitches have no proprietary data sourceReassign them to the standard blog track instead of the quarterly flagship budget30 min
YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A tagged content calendar showing which pitches are real moats, which are commodity content, and a ranked top-3 for Q3 budget.

See a reference example
Sample output
Zomato Q3 backlog audit (excerpt)

FUND
  1. 'Delivery Time Index: 40 Indian Cities' - telemetry, own logistics data
  2. 'Survey: 800 restaurant owners on discovery habits' - survey

DO NOT FUND (commodity)
  3. '15 Food Delivery Trends for 2026' - opinion roundup, no data source

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Correctly tags all six pitches by moat type or 'none'
  • Ranks the three fundable pitches ahead of the three commodity ones