Indie Hackers might want to think twice about building on someone else's platform...👇

Sounds like the broader cautionary message is watch out if your startup is reliant on fixing a small issue with another platform.

The issue isn't "on someone else's platform" but rather "releasing a small, easy to replicate, incremental update to someone else's platform".

Same applies for building apps. I’ve seen many apps die overnight when the feature becomes a part of an iOS update

Me: I hear what you're saying
Also me: Builds tool to auto-generate videos from Tweets and threads 😅

vidds.co/tweet

There are 2 types of products on top of existing tools:

1. Improvement: These are essentially just features to the main tool. You simply improve the existing tool with new features and make it more useful. Usually easier to build but there is a higher risk to be replaced by the original product.

Spell check for figma or weather app for macOS is improvement that can easily be replaced by the product.

2. Enhancement: These are harder to build. Enhancement is the product feature that customers would love to have it but original tool can't provide because of legal, technical or any other reasons.

Adding window management into macOS is enhancement. Because Microsoft has patent to the superior window management system. So tools like rectangle will less likely to suffer.

So, if you want to build on other products, you must ask yourself 3 questions:

1. Is this an improvement or enhancement?
2. Does the og product would bother building it inside the tool. (If you sell template packs, it's less likely that og tool will bother with it)
3. What's the expected lifespan?

The third number is crucial. Because this defines your pricing strategy, hence maximizing the product lifetime revenue.

If the expected lifespan is short, it's better to get all the money now with lifetime deals etc. If the lifetime is long, it's better to go into SaaS route.

That's why many macOS apps goes with pay once type of strategy. So they maximize their revenue because they can become obsolete in any new Mac update.

There's no such thing as not building on someone else's platform. Microsoft brought out Word and Excel to compete with Corel and Lotus 123. If you work in software, this is simply a reality you need to deal with.

Well you could see it that way but at the same time, using your example, that indiehacker that built that figma tool would have had to create a whole new Figma and not just the addon... imagine how long that'd take...

Building on an existing platform has many advantages in the short term.

But thinking long term, you need to be well prepared on how to pivot in case things go wrong.

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The more you depend on another platform, the more risk you take on.

Yep.

You can kind of see this with the direction Airtable is going and tools built on top of it like Softr and Stacker. The latter tools are still the way to go for building external apps - but you'd have to think Airtable is probably taking aim at them with its new interfaces feature (which is internal only, right now).

This is realistically a problem at every level of abstraction and with every platform, imo.

A lot of tools quickly get superceded or lose a lot of ground when operating systems (such as Windows/Linux) add new native features as well. I remember a time where there were 10s (maybe 100s?) of different virus scanners out there, but once Windows Defender came along a lot of them disappeared.

I don't think any platform is safe from this sort of behavior. Best you can do is keep your eyes/ears peeled, and look for ways to diversify and make your product less reliant on a single platform imo.

Now, that's really tough to do if the entire purpose around your product is fixing something that the core platform for whatever reason hasn't. I think that's where you need to analyze the risk involved with building/marketing such a tool: at a certain point you'll probably need to pivot and build something else.

This is one of the main reasons I haven't used no-code platforms yet.Until the no-code platforms, will allow me to export a portable version of the site I create, the lock-in to a specific platform exposes me to price increases, TOS changes, having to learn a new platform, and generally like any ORM library you eventually hit a wall when you need more advanced capabilities.

Agree it can get you up to speed quickly, it just might not be the end-all, be-all.

(disclosure: I am a developer, yes, so perhaps a little biased.)

I watched this for years - slack, notion, figma etc, all those companies that encourage you to join their ecosystem will either copy your features, or acquire you and roll your work into their product.

This is also true of content, you should own the website where your content lives, if you're leaving all your writing on medium or substack that's a risk. You have to outweigh the benefits of the ease of use and network effects of those platforms of course, but we publish all our info directly to our blog and feel much safer knowing we're in control of the platform it resides on.

like

As a maker, I think it is very much possible that the platform / your competitor can copy your product. what should matter is how WELL you can do it against them / how much MORE value can you add to your customers.

Yeah, 😂

Of course. There's a tension and mistrust regarding building things for other platforms. For instance, Shopify seems to be quite aware of this by not charging developers fees for their first Million in revenue for app sales on the platform. It's a tradeoff - you can potentially get faster growth, but the risk is your feature simply gets copied.

I think every tool is technically part of a platform.

If you code an app, that's going to be part of the play store or Apple app store as a platform.

Though I still think his statement has value.

Don't release a tool that could be easily added by a platform, or at least consider that your tool works across multiple platforms.

And also think about how your tool would be different if the platform adds something similar.

To give an example for my product. I'm developing an AI API for BLOOM (an existing open source GPT-3 alternative AI) and Stable Diffusion, and we're using AWS for hosting such models.

However, with the release of Sagemaker, we got worried. But once delving deeper, we realized that Sagemaker is much less accessible in terms of difficulty of deployment and has much less variety of AIs (we plan to have much more in the future).

So it's always important think of how you'd be different for whatever functionality the platform releases. Because any functionality they deliver is going to be simple, and could have many holes which you can fill.

If you're interested, I post more about my AI API on twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch

Depends on the platform. Older companies such as LinkedIn as less likely to bring out these features, and have provided great opportunities to many SaaS founders

There are still really good use cases for this like Shopify, Twitter, Chrome Plugins but I do see the concern here.

I mean, yes. But if i build a tool for a platform, i would build many of them. not only one.