Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Before we move on from this point, talk to be about platform risk, because in my mind, we think about this for Acquired too. We’re always trying to get the most direct relationship possible with our listeners, with our LPs, with everybody. There’s always some platform risk. We’ve collected email addresses from one out of six or seven listeners from all the various reasons that people join our Slack or they sign up for the emails. Which now have the playbooks so there’s even a further incentive to sign up for the emails. But at the end of the day, even if you have someone’s email, you could go to their promotions tab. It’s not like you can call that person. There’s always some amount of indirection between you and your end customers. What do you think about how far you should go on eliminating platform risk? I think everything in business is basically a tradeoff. What you really want to do is just be aware of the tradeoffs that you’re making. There are no hard and fast rules like never build on a platform. If you build on a platform, maybe they can give you additional distribution, but then you get the risk because they might shut you down, change things, or you might lose out on the branding or the ability to differentiate yourself, etc. Maybe you can charge a high amount of revenue per user, but that means you’re going to get maybe fewer users in the door for your customers. But then also, you could spend more to acquire customers. It’s all tradeoffs. For my particular situation, when I did that tradeoff, really the only contender was like, maybe try to build a big Twitter account where I share these stories. I can repeatedly post on Reddit or Hacker News, or I could have a Medium blog. Those are the big platforms that I considered. Every one of them I thought would give me either very limited distribution. Like how much did Medium really help at distribution. It was kind of hit and miss and they would also completely destroy my ability to have any branding. I knew that step two in this playbook might be to build a mailing list or a community. I wasn’t sure. But I knew that if I was going to name it Indie Hackers, go for something where the brand actually mattered, which I think is important if you’re going to have something that’s free and I was getting a lot of users in the door, but it didn’t have a business model, then I wanted to own my brand. It wasn’t worth it for me to use any of these platforms even though they would help at distribution if I could instead just do my own. I also had my own distribution strategy. I already knew that people were going to be eating this kind of stuff up on Hacker News because they already were and Hacker News had a lot of traffic. It’s like, okay, I don’t need Medium. I can do it on my own. I get no real benefit from Medium and I get all these additional risks. The tradeoff just wasn’t worth it. Yup. It’s funny, in some ways you may have run the Airbnb playbook of exfiltrate Craigslist. You did for this segment of Hacker News.…

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