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Comment by NotPavlovsDog | Hacker News Reader

1. Try to build a business on top of a trans-national, for-profit conglomerate.

2. Do so without understanding the TOS, disclosed and, most dangerously, undisclosed.

3. ...

4. Profit? No, collapse.

The internet services as represented by FAANG (throw in Oracle, Microsoft as well as Paypal and Ebay) are conceptually based on silo-and-moat building. Even youtube stars are starting to realize this.

There's a reason why two trends are seeing a resurgence at the moment - the truly open internet and full-service-owned websites and platforms.

One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.

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> One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.

I think slightly differently here. Building tools to leverage these platforms seems like a really easy way to generate some revenue. I think relying on that revenue is the problem. So many companies build just one revenue stream. When that revenue stream is interupted or destroyed the company is destroyed. The whole do one thing and do it well is the core issue, do one thing until you reach a certain point and start doing another thing, and repeat.

> So many companies build just one revenue stream. When that revenue stream is interupted or destroyed the company is destroyed.

It's not just small businesses. As discussed in a post today ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26385317 ) Google suffers from this too: they've got advertising revenues down to less than 90%, but this is still very risky. They have a "tech" premium; normally Wall Street investors are uncomfortable with lopsided revenue exposure.

It's not the only source of revenue, but one of the most important ones.

The thing is that if you want to reach people you need to go where people is.

Generally if more than 20-25% of your revenue comes from one customer, or one segment which you dominate (as with Google) it's a red flag for investors. Google still has the magic pixie dust (and revenue size and margin) to keep investors transfixed.

If the air comes out of the on-line advertising business Google faces an existential challenge (as did the newspapers due to the development of online advertising). They have scraped together less than 15% of revenue from a motley collection of marginal businesses (e.g. Nest) while lack the internal management signals to seriously engage anyone in improving things. For example, I assume that if Dianne Greene left Google Cloud it would simply wither. She has the experience and fortitude to actually make a serious go of it. I seriously doubt there's anyone else in the company who would -- it generally doesn't encourage such people.

An imbalance in revenue has an additional problem for investors, which is blinders. Rockefeller and the other owners of the Standard Oil Trust made significantly more money after the antitrust breakup than they had as a monopoly.

If you want to look back even further, radio when television emerged, and sucked up most of the advertising dollars.

Radio went from premium and premiere programming to disk-jockeys and news/talk.

Trying to recall source(s), though possibly Ithiel de Sola Pool.

> do one thing until you reach a certain point and start doing another thing

Ideally you do multiple things, but multitasking is hard and distracting. Back when I was a student and the woolly mammoth roamed the earth, I administered a small business website. The traffic was mostly google based. I dedicated significant efforts to build partnerships, brand awareness on small niche forums and websites, a link exchange catalog for same-niche-noncompete websites, leveraged several google-competing platforms, created a mailing list and a customer CRM.

When the latest google algo update all but removed the search traffic, the business did not observe any drop in sales, thanks to multiple points of outreach. When apps arrived, we created an RSS feed app that pinged customers with attractive offers, not repeated on the mailing lists.

Confusing tactics for strategy is a very Silicon Valley thing. Every service will betray you, unless you have rights to the source code, has served me well.

Cool. Great. Platform effect sucks.

...But what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are?

Realistically, when you’re building a startup, you use the tools you can get. Perhaps OP did not sufficient hedge across multiple engagement platforms but based on my experience, it’s very plausible that they tried multiple platforms and only found engagement on one.

The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks.

Should OP simply ignore the opportunity because they haven’t been able to engage on another platform?

The problem with a monopoly is precisely that the monopoly’s users don’t have a choice.

> what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it?

Don't do it twice.

> What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are?

Provide platform agnostic services.

I'm no friend or supporter of the massive FAANG companies, but the parent company of Instagram helped popularize the phrase, "move fast and break things." I would never start a business based on another business that espoused that motto.

This response and the GP are so useless to OP.

I suspect that OP has already learned quite a bit about platform effect and will carry those lessons with them forever.

Further, posting this is certainly intended as both a warning to the wise and a call for help.

Saying variations of “platform effect is bad” is simply repeating (with substantially less authority) what OP is already telling us. It’s punditry.

Rather than repeating what we already know, do you have any ideas or advice on how OP can get out of their current pickle?

Apart from trying to get bunches of attention directed towards the issue, which in some cases may or may not make the corporations budge (cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033 which would result in bad PR for said companies), is there really anything to be done in the first place?

I think the person that you replied to seems to imply that there isn't, especially since what OP did may or may not be entirely allowed under the platform's ToS.

> The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks.

If I follow an IG page, I sure don't want them to then go about collecting my data. And we don't know what data the OP was collecting.

That’s totally fair. I feel the same way. I also suspect it’s a widespread practice.

Perhaps if IG as an organization weren’t so opaque we would have better rules for using it as a customer engagement platform. Personally, I share personal information with companies and organizations once I feel like I can trust them enough to care for that information correctly. It would be neat if IG enabled that in an organized way.

Out of curiosity (real and legitimate curiosity because you brought up the privacy concerns) if you found yourself in the situation I mentioned above — your only platform with successful engagement is Instagram and you want to expand off of the platform — how would you approach it? For example, I would probably try to speak plainly and openly with my IG audience about my problem and how it affects a service that they enjoy and request feedback.

I think it depends on the page content and the type of audience you have. For a meme/reels page, for example, I don't think the audience is willing to try another platform just because of you. There are already thousands of pages and it wouldn't matter if your page is gone.

But for a more serious page, like training/news/store, I would make it clear to my audience that they can have some richer content from the same creators on another platform/website. Stories don't work as most people mute them. Videos also don't work as people usually mute them. Put the link in the Bio and let them know where they can find you outside of IG.

I can tell you what we do: We use SM as a reach platform but then we create a direct relationship: email, telegram, FB groups. We've build a community of +150.000 people. They are not gone, however now it's harder for us to reach more people.

I don't know, it seems to me that if you are a paying customer of IG/FB (OP argues they've paid 1000s of $ in ads) you should at least be able to call somebody and get off with a slap on the wrist.

Especially when the "crime" is downloading an excel with your followers -- that IG should provide on the first place.

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