It’s important to remember that customers like using products based on standards because doing so offers them choice and data portability. If a standards-based product happens to break through market fragmentation, it’s important to maintain the benefits users got from the standard in the first place, otherwise you risk alienating your users and... See more

Deliver backwards compatibility

Think about Spotify’s podcast business as an example. A few years ago, the streaming audio giant evolved from being only a music service to being one for other categories of audio, such as podcasts. Given the content and experience differences between music and podcasts, many hoped the company would launch a dedicated podcast listening app to offer... See more

Leverage distribution from proprietary systems

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... 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

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... See more

The Paradox in Newsletters Here’s another more recent example. You’ve likely heard of the amazing newsletter product, Substack. It’s a platform that enables creators to build, host, and scale their own newsletter businesses. The smart thing about Substack is that it uses an open standard — in this case, SMTP, the standard that powers email — to... See more

The Standards Innovation Paradox is the trade-off teams face when building a new product based on standards; reaching product market fit can happen much faster because finding an audience for the product is easier, but the pace of innovation ultimately flatlines due to market inertia and consensus driven standards development.