Be a small fish riding on a big fish
jasonleow • 9 Nov 2024 •
One way to prolong the analogy is being the small fish that feeds off the huge whale, like what you do when building on top of Carrd, or when selling themes for shopify or other similar ideas. – @laurentlahmy
Another good analogy as inspiration!
Day before yesterday, it was fishing in the right spot.
Yesterday was fishing where others are fishing.
Today, it’s about being a small fish riding on a big fish.
Like how I did it for Carrd. A big fish of a website builder platform, a growing market, and I build plugins for it. My pie grows without me doing much, because the platform I’m building for is growing itself. Every day new customers join the Carrd ecosystem, and by extension, that’s how I can access new customers too. I might not capture every single new one of course since the net is leaky, but even a small, single-digit percentage of a growing customer base is good enough for a solo dev like me.
I imagine the same can be true building on top of Wordpress, Webflow, Framer, Spotify, Notion, etc etc.
Yes, there’s platform risk with this, like when Twitter API charges went crazy and all the Twitter schedulers had to shut down. But platform risk is every where (even using something as necessary and ubiquitous as Stripe has non-zero risk). So we just got to choose wisely.
What other big fishes can we ride on?
Comments
Yes indeed. There’s no one way.
This, again, proves the point that there are many ways to achieve success. Even with cautionary tales about “not building on rented land”, there are possibilities of succeeding with such a strategy.