Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
"We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, they just implemented it themselves!"
Business is hard, and I don't have the hubris to assume I can do any better than them, but that's why I don't try. I really feel for the folks that put their time, effort, and creativity into making something useful for people that didn't pan out... but this just seems really shortsighted.
Of course the problem of fundamentally building on someone else's platform remains. This is why it's a good idea to start at least thinking about how to move your business onto another platform, from day zero. Of course there's a balance between investing time and money in building abstraction layers and evaluating other platforms and doing these different things, versus spending that time and money on immediate growth. But if one invests literally 0 in this situation, they can hardly expect much sympathy if the underlying platform gets yanked out from underneath them and kills their business.
We have a finite amount of life energy to put into our businesses and I’d prefer to give it to something that can generate an annuity.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Does Exxon stop drilling for oil just because it won’t be possible someday?
If I'm understanding the timeline and details, it isn't that Shopify came out with a better solution which lost them customers. Shopify banned them from adding any new customers and at some point later Shopify delivered something that replicated some of their features.
Would a good analogy would be Apple banning other web browsers on iPhone, because they are an important part of the iPhone experience?
His conclusion was that this was a limited time opportunity, which he profited from and it has come to an end.
They could just said that they do it for the safety of children and some would believe it.
This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software. Sure the gravy train stopped, but man I hope to be shortsighted like that someday.
While living in Bulgaria
That’s a staggering amount of money in this context.
You can pray that the platform's customers will be upset if your product gets killed ("Shoppify broke our checkout screen" is not exactly bringing in new users) but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company.
In this case, I do think legal action would've succeeded, but it would probably be a long, expensive, painful lawsuit, that's probably too much for this company to bear. You're also not guaranteed that the judge will make the losing party pay for your defence even if you do win, so it could easily be quite a Pyrrhic victory.
With the new DMA coming into effect soon, I think businesses like these will stand a much better chance. The restrictions put onto gatekeepers by the EU can introduce significant risks to platforms being scummy to smaller developers.
- Buyers of leading edge fab services have patented features in their chip designs which TSMC would violate by simple cloning.
- If TSMC wanted to profitably manufacture something like "a modern GPU, but avoiding existing patents" they'd have to expand massively beyond their current core competency of fabrication. They'd need experienced chip designers, software engineers for developing drivers and APIs, retail partners... it's a much different business.
The key thing that makes "Sherlocking" easy is that it's just imitating third party software with first party software, from a first party that is already good at making software.
This separation of responsibilities presents TSMC with a difficult reverse engineering challenge if they were interested in violating their NDA.
A similar question would be how Airbus prevents airlines from building their own airplanes.
Simple. Reach out to the platform and ask to be acquired. You might not get top dollar, but it beats having the plug pulled. While he acknowledges he didn't expect the gravy to be pouring forever, he also didn't have an exit mapped. Exit is one of those things that is in the text book definition of what is an entrepreneur.
> I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.
Shopify shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole with these guys—they made their stance very very clear and the author willfully ignored it. This isn't just a case of platform dependence, it's a case of deliberately ignoring the platform's repeated warnings that you aren't authorized to be running your business.
We should be rooting for the small guys like this who shake monopolies out of their complacency.
No, they shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole, I'd argue they shouldn't be allowed to.
Any two businesses are welcome to transact with each other, as long as they're not using resources that belong to a third party who doesn't want to be involved in the transaction.
And if shopify actually didn't want to be involved they would just fire those customers.
"I always saw Checkout X as a limited-time-window opportunity and honestly I couldn’t see a future different to what happened to us."
I don't begrudge OP making some money on this product, but I'm definitely not sympathetic to this outcome.
Good for him.
I agree with you.
He acknowledges this in the post.