3 builders who never spoke to each other
Answer the platform's free version with the gap it leaves
When the platform you sit on ships a free competitor, find what the free version does badly and sell the add-on that fixes it to the people already using it. The general form is refusing to position as the best tool for one vendor: supporting several, including hybrid setups, is the advantage buyers name and the one a platform vendor has no incentive to copy.
The method
- 01
When the platform releases a free competitor to your app, find what the free version does badly and sell an add-on that fixes it for the people already using it.
- 02
Do not position as the best tool for one cloud - support multiple clouds and hybrid environments, which is the advantage buyers cite most and one the platform vendors have no incentive to copy.
- 03
Expect the objection that a free local alternative eats you from below, and answer it with the case where the on-device champion itself moved to the cloud.
What it returned
- $4,000
After Shopify shipped a free rival to OrderlyPrint and sales stalled at just over $4,000 a month, Bjorn built Order Printer Templates so merchants could make branded invoices and packing slips inside Shopify's free app; it grew faster than the original and got him near $10,000 a month, enough to quit his bank job in 2015.
- 84%
A Rightscale survey found 84% of enterprises run applications and workflows spread across public cloud, private cloud and on-prem environments; he says multi-cloud support is the most common reason decision makers give him for buying software instead of the cloud vendor's version.
A capable 14B model runs free on a laptop, yet Apple shifted frontier Apple Intelligence onto cloud vaults because the best models exceed a laptop.
Sources
- How to build a Shopify app – Björn’s journey to $300k in profitsJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · What did your journey to profitability look like? What were your biggest struggles? · undated
- Blind AI: Idle-Mac Networks, Zero Premium, Discovery Risk - Trends.vcDru Riley · trends.vc · 😠 Haters · 2026-06-24
- When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the CompetitionGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · Support Multi-Cloud · 2019-10-25
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
More in positioning
- Do the boring market homework yourself7 unconnected · contested
- Build for a market you already belong to6 unconnected
- Aim everything at the segment you already win6 unconnected
- Narrow the category until you are its only occupant6 unconnected
- Pick the fight the incumbent cannot win6 unconnected
- Pick the market nobody is excited about6 unconnected