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"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for t

by nolok 3y ago

"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Absolutely this. If you’ve built something profitable on someone else’s land, get big and cash out as fast as you can. It’s unsustainable, you’re just doing an arbitrage play while it lasts. Do well fast so you optimize for more dice rolls in the future.
- drited 3y ago
  The author seems well aware of that though.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Reinforcing the idea to help avoid future heartbreak and broken dreams for people here. If you’re equipped with the knowledge upfront, you won’t be as unhappy later. Expectations minus reality equals happiness.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Building apps for other platforms, be they Shoppify or the App Store, always comes with the risk of getting booted off or Sherlocked. You can pray that the platform's customers will be upset if your product gets killed ("Shoppify broke our checkout screen" is not exactly bringing in new users) but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company. In this case, I do think legal action would've succeeded, but it would probably be a long, expensive, painful lawsuit, that's probably too much for this company to bear. You're also not guaranteed that the judge will make the losing party pay for your defence even if you do win, so it could easily be quite a Pyrrhic victory. With the new DMA coming into effect soon, I think businesses like these will stand a much better chance. The restrictions put onto gatekeepers by the EU can introduce significant risks to platforms being scummy to smaller developers.
- caycep 3y ago
  One question in my mind is - how does TSMC structure their "platform" such that not-sherlocking-customers is incentivized into their business model?
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    I don't think that TSMC is really in a position to Sherlock their customers: - Buyers of leading edge fab services have patented features in their chip designs which TSMC would violate by simple cloning. - If TSMC wanted to profitably manufacture something like "a modern GPU, but avoiding existing patents" they'd have to expand massively beyond their current core competency of fabrication. They'd need experienced chip designers, software engineers for developing drivers and APIs, retail partners... it's a much different business. The key thing that makes "Sherlocking" easy is that it's just imitating third party software with first party software, from a first party that is already good at making software.
  - politician 3y ago
    As I understand it from my time at AMD, TSMC provides what is essentially an SDK for specifying how to use their process for a given node. Clients translate (compile) their higher level specifications into this framework for fabrication, and own responsibility for characterizing (testing) the resulting silicon. This separation of responsibilities presents TSMC with a difficult reverse engineering challenge if they were interested in violating their NDA.
  - dtech 3y ago
    They don't have to. Building a semiconductor fab is such an enormous investment and requires so much specific knowledge that it's not an attractive option, orders of magnitude harder than copying some software. A similar question would be how Airbus prevents airlines from building their own airplanes.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  > "but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company." Simple. Reach out to the platform and ask to be acquired. You might not get top dollar, but it beats having the plug pulled. While he acknowledges he didn't expect the gravy to be pouring forever, he also didn't have an exit mapped. Exit is one of those things that is in the text book definition of what is an entrepreneur.
idopmstuff 3y ago
You're even understating the case for this particular issue. I own a Shopify store, and one thing that I found out early on is that Shopify does not want you to mess with checkout. It is far and away the most limited piece of their application in terms of customization, and their help articles made it clear that it could not be changed. This app is built on top of a platform and doing something that the platform did not intend for you to be able to do. I don't begrudge OP making some money on this product, but I'm definitely not sympathetic to this outcome.
- selectodude 3y ago
  Didn’t really seem like OP was asking for sympathy. Didn’t take outside money, fully bootstrapped, took his money and went home. Good for him.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    If everyone involved can pivot easily enough, I'm sure it was probably a useful exercise in figuring out how to alleviate subpar product design, and getting a software project off the ground.
chefandy 3y ago
It's not even like they were making some cool thing that just happened to only run on AWS or something. It's more like: "We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, they just implemented it themselves!" Business is hard, and I don't have the hubris to assume I can do any better than them, but that's why I don't try. I really feel for the folks that put their time, effort, and creativity into making something useful for people that didn't pan out... but this just seems really shortsighted.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  It can still be a great business strategy, as long as you're aware of exactly the points you outlined. You just can't run a normal startup strategy of subsidized growth, instead you have to rush through the product lifecycle towards cash cow status and make hay while the sun is shining. Once $bigcorp kills your business by implementing their backlog you pivot to something else, with the advantage of already having a huge database of people willing to pay extra for such features.
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    It's rarely the case that there's only room for one player in a given market. Market segmentation is a real thing, for good reasons. If $BIGCO pivots to producing a product similar to yours, that doesn't have to mean "the end". I'd suggest everybody read The Discipline of Market Leaders for more on how to choose among different strategies and position yourself vis-a-vis competitors. Of course the problem of fundamentally building on someone else's platform remains. This is why it's a good idea to start at least thinking about how to move your business onto another platform, from day zero. Of course there's a balance between investing time and money in building abstraction layers and evaluating other platforms and doing these different things, versus spending that time and money on immediate growth. But if one invests literally 0 in this situation, they can hardly expect much sympathy if the underlying platform gets yanked out from underneath them and kills their business.
lolinder 3y ago
It's worse than that—within 6 months of them starting to operate Shopify updated the ToS to make it clear that the app they already knew was a grey area was actually formally banned. They received an email that said they wouldn't be shut down right away, which the author took to mean "carry on!" Then Shopify's COO called them personally to tell them to knock it off, and they used a technicality in the phrasing of the ToS to keep operating. Shopify shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole with these guys—they made their stance very very clear and the author willfully ignored it. This isn't just a case of platform dependence, it's a case of deliberately ignoring the platform's repeated warnings that you aren't authorized to be running your business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- drited 3y ago
  Aren't authorised? You seem to be way to accepting of authority for my liking. We should be rooting for the small guys like this who shake monopolies out of their complacency.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I'm perfectly happy for someone to shake up a monopoly. I'm not okay with people acting entitled to do so on top of someone else's platform when that someone else has made it clear they're not welcome.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Why should Shopify be allowed to decide what two other businesses (merchant and OP) willingly do just because they own the platform? No, they shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole, I'd argue they shouldn't be allowed to.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    What OP did was bypass Shopify entirely for the checkout part of the process, thereby taking away Shopify's revenue for OP's customers. That's not software freedom, that's theft. Any two businesses are welcome to transact with each other, as long as they're not using resources that belong to a third party who doesn't want to be involved in the transaction.
PUSH_AX 3y ago
They’re still millions of dollars richer. It’s hard to be entitled about it because of the reasons outlined, but this was a great if ephemeral business.
jasonlotito 3y ago
"I decided to misrepresent what the article said and respond to some strawman to make myself seem smart." I agree with you.
zengid 3y ago
I feel like this applies to iOS apps too
cddotdotslash 3y ago
Did you read the article? The author understands this. They addressed it directly: > I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.
henry2023 3y ago
"After everything, I still believe that Shopify built their platform and they should be able to do whatever they want with it." He acknowledges this in the post.
lq9AJ8yrfs 3y ago
Can you keep going on this? Is it a slippery slope fallacy to lump in app store, handset, cloud, web browser, instruction set architecture? Only half teasing - seems like there should be a measure of platforms. Like the Gini coefficient, except for platforms instead of countries.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Borgz 3y ago
From the article: "I always saw Checkout X as a limited-time-window opportunity and honestly I couldn’t see a future different to what happened to us."
kubota 3y ago
I feel like many niche AI startups that use ChatGPT / X as their foundation might learn this the hard way.

by nolok 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Absolutely this. If you’ve built something profitable on someone else’s land, get big and cash out as fast as you can. It’s unsustainable, you’re just doing an arbitrage play while it lasts. Do well fast so you optimize for more dice rolls in the future.

drited 3y ago
The author seems well aware of that though.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Reinforcing the idea to help avoid future heartbreak and broken dreams for people here. If you’re equipped with the knowledge upfront, you won’t be as unhappy later. Expectations minus reality equals happiness.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Building apps for other platforms, be they Shoppify or the App Store, always comes with the risk of getting booted off or Sherlocked. You can pray that the platform's customers will be upset if your product gets killed ("Shoppify broke our checkout screen" is not exactly bringing in new users) but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company. In this case, I do think legal action would've succeeded, but it would probably be a long, expensive, painful lawsuit, that's probably too much for this company to bear. You're also not guaranteed that the judge will make the losing party pay for your defence even if you do win, so it could easily be quite a Pyrrhic victory. With the new DMA coming into effect soon, I think businesses like these will stand a much better chance. The restrictions put onto gatekeepers by the EU can introduce significant risks to platforms being scummy to smaller developers.

caycep 3y ago
One question in my mind is - how does TSMC structure their "platform" such that not-sherlocking-customers is incentivized into their business model?
- philipkglass 3y ago
  I don't think that TSMC is really in a position to Sherlock their customers: - Buyers of leading edge fab services have patented features in their chip designs which TSMC would violate by simple cloning. - If TSMC wanted to profitably manufacture something like "a modern GPU, but avoiding existing patents" they'd have to expand massively beyond their current core competency of fabrication. They'd need experienced chip designers, software engineers for developing drivers and APIs, retail partners... it's a much different business. The key thing that makes "Sherlocking" easy is that it's just imitating third party software with first party software, from a first party that is already good at making software.
- politician 3y ago
  As I understand it from my time at AMD, TSMC provides what is essentially an SDK for specifying how to use their process for a given node. Clients translate (compile) their higher level specifications into this framework for fabrication, and own responsibility for characterizing (testing) the resulting silicon. This separation of responsibilities presents TSMC with a difficult reverse engineering challenge if they were interested in violating their NDA.
- dtech 3y ago
  They don't have to. Building a semiconductor fab is such an enormous investment and requires so much specific knowledge that it's not an attractive option, orders of magnitude harder than copying some software. A similar question would be how Airbus prevents airlines from building their own airplanes.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> "but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company." Simple. Reach out to the platform and ask to be acquired. You might not get top dollar, but it beats having the plug pulled. While he acknowledges he didn't expect the gravy to be pouring forever, he also didn't have an exit mapped. Exit is one of those things that is in the text book definition of what is an entrepreneur.

idopmstuff 3y ago

You're even understating the case for this particular issue. I own a Shopify store, and one thing that I found out early on is that Shopify does not want you to mess with checkout. It is far and away the most limited piece of their application in terms of customization, and their help articles made it clear that it could not be changed. This app is built on top of a platform and doing something that the platform did not intend for you to be able to do. I don't begrudge OP making some money on this product, but I'm definitely not sympathetic to this outcome.

selectodude 3y ago
Didn’t really seem like OP was asking for sympathy. Didn’t take outside money, fully bootstrapped, took his money and went home. Good for him.
- chefandy 3y ago
  If everyone involved can pivot easily enough, I'm sure it was probably a useful exercise in figuring out how to alleviate subpar product design, and getting a software project off the ground.

chefandy 3y ago

It's not even like they were making some cool thing that just happened to only run on AWS or something. It's more like: "We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, they just implemented it themselves!" Business is hard, and I don't have the hubris to assume I can do any better than them, but that's why I don't try. I really feel for the folks that put their time, effort, and creativity into making something useful for people that didn't pan out... but this just seems really shortsighted.

wongarsu 3y ago
It can still be a great business strategy, as long as you're aware of exactly the points you outlined. You just can't run a normal startup strategy of subsidized growth, instead you have to rush through the product lifecycle towards cash cow status and make hay while the sun is shining. Once $bigcorp kills your business by implementing their backlog you pivot to something else, with the advantage of already having a huge database of people willing to pay extra for such features.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  It's rarely the case that there's only room for one player in a given market. Market segmentation is a real thing, for good reasons. If $BIGCO pivots to producing a product similar to yours, that doesn't have to mean "the end". I'd suggest everybody read The Discipline of Market Leaders for more on how to choose among different strategies and position yourself vis-a-vis competitors. Of course the problem of fundamentally building on someone else's platform remains. This is why it's a good idea to start at least thinking about how to move your business onto another platform, from day zero. Of course there's a balance between investing time and money in building abstraction layers and evaluating other platforms and doing these different things, versus spending that time and money on immediate growth. But if one invests literally 0 in this situation, they can hardly expect much sympathy if the underlying platform gets yanked out from underneath them and kills their business.

lolinder 3y ago

It's worse than that—within 6 months of them starting to operate Shopify updated the ToS to make it clear that the app they already knew was a grey area was actually formally banned. They received an email that said they wouldn't be shut down right away, which the author took to mean "carry on!" Then Shopify's COO called them personally to tell them to knock it off, and they used a technicality in the phrasing of the ToS to keep operating. Shopify shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole with these guys—they made their stance very very clear and the author willfully ignored it. This isn't just a case of platform dependence, it's a case of deliberately ignoring the platform's repeated warnings that you aren't authorized to be running your business.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
drited 3y ago
Aren't authorised? You seem to be way to accepting of authority for my liking. We should be rooting for the small guys like this who shake monopolies out of their complacency.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I'm perfectly happy for someone to shake up a monopoly. I'm not okay with people acting entitled to do so on top of someone else's platform when that someone else has made it clear they're not welcome.
matsemann 3y ago
Why should Shopify be allowed to decide what two other businesses (merchant and OP) willingly do just because they own the platform? No, they shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole, I'd argue they shouldn't be allowed to.
- lolinder 3y ago
  What OP did was bypass Shopify entirely for the checkout part of the process, thereby taking away Shopify's revenue for OP's customers. That's not software freedom, that's theft. Any two businesses are welcome to transact with each other, as long as they're not using resources that belong to a third party who doesn't want to be involved in the transaction.

PUSH_AX 3y ago

They’re still millions of dollars richer. It’s hard to be entitled about it because of the reasons outlined, but this was a great if ephemeral business.

jasonlotito 3y ago

"I decided to misrepresent what the article said and respond to some strawman to make myself seem smart." I agree with you.

zengid 3y ago

I feel like this applies to iOS apps too

cddotdotslash 3y ago

Did you read the article? The author understands this. They addressed it directly: > I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.

henry2023 3y ago

"After everything, I still believe that Shopify built their platform and they should be able to do whatever they want with it." He acknowledges this in the post.

lq9AJ8yrfs 3y ago

Can you keep going on this? Is it a slippery slope fallacy to lump in app store, handset, cloud, web browser, instruction set architecture? Only half teasing - seems like there should be a measure of platforms. Like the Gini coefficient, except for platforms instead of countries.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Borgz 3y ago

From the article: "I always saw Checkout X as a limited-time-window opportunity and honestly I couldn’t see a future different to what happened to us."

kubota 3y ago

I feel like many niche AI startups that use ChatGPT / X as their foundation might learn this the hard way.