The Dangers of Building on Someone Else's Platform | Hacker News Reader

The Dangers of Building on Someone Else's Platform

trevoro.ca

29 pointsmcantelon7 comments

Filling in a vendor's niche is about as old a business model as vendors and there has always, always, always been the risk of being replaced by a built-in solution.

It's got nothing to do with the vendors being hostile nor is it even remotely curious or in any way novel. It is the way industry works. An enterprising someone finds a niche and either grows the niche and the niche is either paved over or absorbed. Rinse repeat etc.

I think it's worth pointing out here that the most successful (largest) companies are full-stack vendors that have as few external dependencies as possible.

Look at the histories of Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Adobe, IBM, HP, etc. All of them had complete, standalone products right out of the gate. More to the point, they took the revenue from that product and then moved to ruthlessly and consistently 'fill gaps', displacing other businesses along the way.

If your business depends on somebody else's "platform", then you're quite likely living on borrowed time. It might be okay as a way to bootstrap, but I'd recommend getting as independent as you can, as soon as possible.

This is a huge problem lately. In the last two weeks we've seen hostile action from Apple, Facebook, Ning, Stack Overflow, and Twitter. Building something with other peoples tools is too risky at this point. If you're successful, they'll just change the terms of service, ban you, and implement your product.

I think the trick is to have a long term plan that makes you less tied to the platform, if not get out from it entirely, but use the advantages of whatever platform you pick to jump start you into cash flow and notice that lets you find a market and then build from there.

Trick is figuring out how much time you'll need to move out from under the shadow of the service you are hooking on to, and that I'm not sure if can be easily figured in many situations.

Although it's risky, building on top of another platform reduces your marketing time by greatly since you get free eyeballs already. Plus its more rewarding to build something that succeeded but getting screwed by a new TOS than it is to build something and waiting to get an audience and never succeeding. In other words, it's better to fail early or succeed early than it is to be in neither.

Take the example of vBSEO. Since 2005, their main product has been a plugin that addresses the missing SEO element in vBulletin. You would think that vBulletin would either build this functionality into newer versions or buy vBSEO, but it hasn't happened yet. In fact, with several patents for SEO technology, when it does happen, they'll probably have other products and services ready.

I think starting by improving an existing moustrap gives you enough of a headstart over startups building entirely new mousetraps, that once you have market share and profitability, you can branch out into other areas.

vBSEO is just one example. They are lucky that vBulletin hasn't added this functionality to their main product line.

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