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independence6 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 10 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

this one failed

confidence

high

evidence

12 claims · 12 articles · 4 receipts

window

2013-08-04 → 2024-12-05

6 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Price the platform's power to end you

Whoever owns the platform you build on can reprice access, rewrite the rules or ship your feature, and each of those has already closed businesses: an API moving to tens of thousands a month, a policy revision forcing a full rebuild, a hyperscaler shipping the same thing. Treat the dependency as a live risk with a number attached, diversify early, and remember the discovery layer under every growth tool belongs to somebody else too. The counterargument is that specialising inside a big ecosystem cuts market risk, because demand for that ecosystem's specialists already exists.

Where this splits

Platform dependence is treated as an existential risk to be diversified away from, and separately as a risk reducer, since anchoring a practice inside one large ecosystem puts you in front of demand that already exists.

  1. side 01 · 10 claims

    Treat platform dependence as a risk to diversify

    Cory Zue · Dru Riley · Greg Kogan · Jordi Giménez · Justin Jackson · Luca Restagno · Rand Fishkin

    1. 1Whatever platform you build on effectively owns the business, and it can turn the tap off whenever it likes.
    2. 2A platform can end your business by repricing access, so treat the dependency as a live risk rather than a footnote.
    3. 3Price your dependence on someone else's platform into the plan, because a supplier's repricing has already put businesses under.
    4. 4Treat a distribution platform's rule changes as a live threat to the business, not a maintenance chore: a policy revision can force a rebuild or delist you.
    5. 5If your product lives inside someone else's ecosystem, treat that dependency as a live risk and diversify away from it as early as you can.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Specialise inside one big ecosystem where demand exists

    Dru Riley · Timothy Ricks

    1. 1Specialising inside a large ecosystem cuts market risk even though it adds dependence, because demand for that ecosystem's specialists already exists.
    2. 2Anchor your practice to one platform's ecosystem and own that niche, so buyers searching the platform find one obvious specialist.

What it returned

  • $42k

    An API repriced to $42k per month forced the sale of two products that were eighteen months old.

  • $100

    API access went from free to a $100 per month tier too limited to use, with the usable tier priced at $42k per month.

  • 2022

    Bubble's pricing changes are cited as having ended some companies, with repricing attempts in both 2022 and 2023.

  • Manifest V3 rewrote how content-filtering extensions operate, and everything still on Manifest V2 had to migrate or be removed.

Sources

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.

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More in other

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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.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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