It’s a question investors often ask. And on the surface, it seems reasonable. After all, software is just code, right? With a decent team and a few sprints, you should be able to replicate what’s there. But that question overlooks what truly makes software valuable. The codebase itself is only the visible layer. Beneath it lies a foundation of lessons, missteps, customer feedback, internal debates, and product decisions, most of which aren’t captured in the codebase.

Every button, every error message, every workaround reflects dozens of decisions shaped by real-world usage. The edge cases that were only discovered after a tough support call. The compromises made to ship on time. The priorities adjusted because users behaved differently than expected. These are things you can’t spec out on day one of a rewrite.

You can copy-paste code, but you can’t copy-paste the intuition that comes from years of operating it. The team who built the product carries context, what not to do, where the landmines are, which parts are deceptively complex. A new team starting fresh will have to re-learn much of that the hard way. And by then, the market may have moved on.

So when you’re trying to estimate the value of a software product, don’t just count the engineering hours it might take to recreate it. Ask how long it took to understand the problem deeply enough to build something users love, and stick with. That’s the real investment. That’s the real moat.