Paul GrahamVerified account

Would you say ideas are not a differentiator when it comes to success of a startup / business?

Yeah. Because market opportunity is not as helpful as passion to sustain hard effort for a long period of time. Better find something you love doing

I agree but then it's hard to be sure that people will actually pay for that, just because you will

Or perhaps something you need to get done but you hate doing enough to pay someone to do it (i.e. collecting garbage).

a moat that may even be just the amount of code involved in building an MVP to supercede something legacy/underwhelming, when that thing is deceptively complex *under the hood*.

Agreed, but can you mitigate this risk by researching the industry enough to measure that moat? As a corollary, this danger exists even while building something you want yourself.