The Standards Innovation Paradox

And so they did something recently that was very smart, but perhaps not surprising given the limitations of standards: they launched an app that enables them to build out their own rich experience for email newsletters. This makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. If Substack is able to scale its app successfully, it can rapidly innovate on the newsle... See more

But despite the amazing ability to tap into SMTP for instant distribution to readers, there’s a tradeoff with this approach: email is static, and as long as email clients are powered by the standard of SMTP, it will remain static. This means Substack cannot use email to do anything dynamic, like personalize the discovery experience of the reader in... See more

RSS has also been instrumental to enabling the consumption side of podcasting. Virtually all of the world’s podcast listening apps that exist in the world of podcasts (such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and many others) support the ingestion of RSS-powered podcasts. The benefit of doing so is huge: if a podcast listening app adopts this sta... See more

Trade-offs Since adopting RSS saves podcast listening apps an enormous amount of time and money by not forcing them to reinvent the way content flows through the podcasting ecosystem, it means the barriers to finding an audience for these apps is lower. As a result, many of these apps exist, and thus a tremendous amount of market fragmentation has ... See more

Standards help teams save time and money by giving them a common language for how their products can interact with other products, eliminating the need to build each component within a market or re-define how systems communicate with each other.

Leverage distribution from proprietary systems

Benefits of standardization

Example: RSS (Really Simple Syndication)SS has long been the backbone of podcasts, providing a powerful distribution mechanism that enables creators to publish their audio from a single endpoint and immediately syndicate their content to any consumption platform that wants to ingest it.

In contrast to the podcast example above, where any platform that adopted RSS could instantly have the supply side of the chicken and egg problem solved, Substack did the opposite: it solved the demand side by ensuring all of its consumers already had a way to read newsletter content. This is a really smart strategy, and so as a platform, it has ta... See more