3 builders who never spoke to each other

Work in the open so copying cannot hurt you

Once rivals can see everything, you are forced to build the kind of advantage copying cannot take: a marketplace of buyers and sellers, a social graph, an audience, rather than the software itself. A purely technical lead is temporary because most engineering gets rebuilt faster and cheaper than it was invented, so publishing how you solved the hard problem costs little and the timestamp proves who was first.

The method

1. 01

   Work in the open on purpose: once rivals can see everything, you are forced to build the kind of advantage that copying cannot take from you.

2. 02

   Document publicly how you solved the hard compliance problem, even though competitors will copy it, and let the timestamp prove you were first.

3. 03

   Put your moat in assets money cannot buy, such as a marketplace of buyers and sellers or a social graph, rather than in the software itself.

4. 04

   Treat a purely technical lead as temporary, because most technical work gets rebuilt by others faster and more cheaply than it was invented.

5. 05

   Let anyone republish your work in full on their own site, and drop the paywall, the ads and the ad-blocker nag.

What it returned

• 2021

  Fathom wrote up its EU Isolation build in 2021 knowing rivals would need it; by the time the ruling landed the system had already handled billions of page views, while other vendors had spent nearly two years telling customers Schrems II did not matter.

• Etsy could open source its whole stack and still hold the market because the buyers and sellers are the asset; Facebook released its data centre designs publicly without weakening its network.

• He names Amazon AWS as one of the rare cases where a technical advantage held, and points out that being first to market often does not mean winning it.

• The Markup carries no advertising, no paywall and no popup demanding you disable your blocker, and allows any article to be reposted in its entirety elsewhere.

Sources

• Building in public forces true competitive advantageJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Building in public forces true competitive advantage · 2016-12-20
• Your website analytics are breaking the law - Fathom AnalyticsJack Ellis · usefathom.com · Easy: Use an analytics provider that doesn’t transfer EU data to the US · 2022-01-17
• Privacy Stories: The Markup - Fathom AnalyticsJulia Angwin · usefathom.com · Privacy Stories: The Markup · 2021-06-21