Saved by sari
Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Remain a Platform, or become an Aggregator?
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
That is the key decision that Shopify, Substack, Teachable, Superpeer, MyVillage, Wonderschool, WeeCare, Squire, Dumpling, SmartHop, and every other BiaB platform will ultimately face.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Do they remain a Platform, or become an Aggregator?
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
But becoming an Aggregator can also lead you astray from your core focus and vision, and can upset the businesses that came to your platform to launch in the first place, precisely because they did not want to get aggregated down the road. The most successful businesses created on the BiaB platform could leave.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Shopify is one of the most interesting companies in the world today.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
There are three fundamental aspects to every BiaB platform:
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Platforms facilitate a relationship between users and third-party developers. Aggregators, on the other hand, intermediate the relationship between users and third-party developers.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Today, Substack provides a few tools, such as the Share button, to grow a newsletter.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
The platform enables you to start a business.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi • Shopify and The Key Decision for Business-in-a-Box Platforms
Substack could decide, for example, to provide an app that showcases all of its writers, enabling a user to search through the newsletters, browse articles, and sign up for those they wish to. This would be analogous to the Shop app by Shopify.