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.

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.

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.

I wouldn’t call it a “great” business strategy if your shelf life is limited.

We have a finite amount of life energy to put into our businesses and I’d prefer to give it to something that can generate an annuity.

Financial technology has you covered: spend your finite life energy providing the feature until the bigco implements it themselves, then buy an annuity with the profits you made in the meantime.

Almost all businesses have a limited shelf life and/or a business cycle of growth and decline. The scale is just different.

Does Exxon stop drilling for oil just because it won’t be possible someday?

I mean, the fact that this guy was making $7.2MM a year in revenue from his software seems relevant.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

Heh, deep company backlogs are a great place to mine for startup ideas.

> Then, out of nowhere, they just implemented it themselves!

I'm understanding the timeline and details, it isn't that Shopify came out with a better solution which lost them customers. Shopify banned them from adding any new customers and at some point later Shopify delivered something that replicated some of their features.

After reading the article, I think the turning point was when Terms of Service were unilaterally changed to forbid selling his service to new customers. If he'd been permitted to keep selling to new customers, he'd have been able to continue.

Would a good analogy would be Apple banning other web browsers on iPhone, because they are an important part of the iPhone experience?

His conclusion was that this was a limited time opportunity, which he profited from and it has come to an end.

Apple bans other browser engines because can they run arbitrary code, which is not allowed per the store rules. They are fine with other browsers on top of WebKit.

Banning other browsers with extra steps.

They could just said that they do it for the safety of children and some would believe it.

>> "...but this just seems really shortsighted."

This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software. Sure the gravy train stopped, but man I hope to be shortsighted like that someday.

> This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software

While living in Bulgaria

And so what? That's still a lot. Who's making that mind of money there? He even started investing in smaller businesses.

I think you’re misunderstanding.

That’s a staggering amount of money in this context.

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.

One question in my mind is - how does TSMC structure their "platform" such that not-sherlocking-customers is incentivized into their business model?

* * *

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.

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.

> "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.

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.

The author seems well aware of that though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's not theft. Calm your horses.

And if shopify actually didn't want to be involved they would just fire those customers.

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.

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.

Agreed. At that point, he should have turned around and offer to be bought out by Shopify. Instead, he was greedy and figured running it into the ground was the only way out. Maybe that was true. Maybe not.

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.

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

I agree with you.

I feel like this applies to iOS apps too

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.

"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.

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.

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."

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