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That's a reasonable point, but "sufficiently differentiated from their offerings" is pretty broad. Anything that's not a physical service could be considered in

That's a reasonable point, but "sufficiently differentiated from their offerings" is pretty broad. Anything that's not a physical service could be considered insufficiently differentiated, not to mention that they could screw you much worse than simple imitation. Gussying up your idea and presenting it in a more integrated manner through internal APIs would be tame compared to the fact that they can actually revoke your API access. If they don't want to compete with you, they can completely shut you out, period.

Jtsummers 11y ago
Right. If I make a business connecting small business inventory lists to FB messenger so people can find out what's there to buy/steal (hey, you know someone will eventually think of this), FB will eventually offer this. Or Square (being in a better position right now to do so, FB isn't in the point-of-sale system yet). This pretty much means that if you build any middle-man business, you should expect it to fail in the long-run (at best, get acquired), unless you can develop a sufficiently large network to stand on your own (very hard at this stage, but not impossible). Make the video games, ideally not casual or not simply implementations of existing, public domain, games like chess or something. Make the music. Make the movies. Make the articles. FB and others will connect you to customers because that's their value proposition to customers: connecting you to the things you want. They have no need to connect you to a middle man when they can be the middle man (why would they connect you to Steam or GoG, when they can replace those platforms in short order?).