tags: #publish links: [[Business Strategy and Competition]] created: 2021-11-15 Mon --- # Protecting your platform from competition [[Create a platform instead of a product]] Mature platforms have to think about protection. What stops your platform from being disrupted by competition? What is the moat around a platform? - Switching costs - avoid customers leaving by making it prohibitively expensive to leave. - Positive: Ecosystem lock-in: make the feature set so rich and useful that they don't want to leave. - Negative: Integration: your individual applications might get outcompeted by better competition, but in combination plus platform synergies they're better overall than running the separate competitor's better applications individually. Or, sufficiently cheaper when bought together. - Negative: [[Vendor Lock-in]]; make it hard to get the data out in a practically-useful form. - [[Patents and Competition]] - make it illegal for competitors to replicate some parts of your platform. - Scale and revenue: a mature platform may be able to fund expensive or sophisticated functionality due to scale, collecting a percentage of ecosystem, etc; due to [[Network Effects]] this is hard to recreate without heavy loss-leader spending. - Scale: ecosystem: your ecosystem wrote much of the code that keeps your customers here. Your competition can't cheaply recreate all that. - Flexibility / agility: ecosystem: your ecosystem can deliver new functionality faster than you or your competition can. - Prevent disintermediation: You don't want your ecosystem vendors eventually doing business with your customers directly, only via you and your platform. How do you ensure that?