ML

We have more data to do statistical compute on.

What strategies could exist here?

strategy target user value prop
Sell pre-trained models Non-data scientist Models and model interface
Sell ML-powered insights Non-data scientist Models and data ingestion
Sell a ML-based product to handle physical tasks at scale End user in target industry Cheaper and more capable
Sell tooling Data scientists Workflow integration

DevTools

Reducing areas of high knowledge into a minimal knowledge is explosive for productivity.

Target less knowledgeable developers

The less a developer knows about something, the more willing they are willing to buy than build.

Developer experience is a competitive advantage

Better developer experience itself is a way to dramatically reduce the amount of knowledge needed. Developer experience is largely exposed in superior documentation, education, feedback and examples. The more of this there are, the less direct knowledge you end since copying and running appropriate code snippets can allow you to learn what you need.

Value capture at the right layers

Most tools require a level of usage and integration before the developer believes that there is legitimate value behind the tool. Gating access is unlikely to develop the kind of developer ecosystem needed to make tooling work.

In general the following strategies have strong value capture

  1. Volume based for transactions (ex. MailGun, Stripe, RevenueCat)
  2. Value capture on hosting (ex. Vercel, Confluence, Redis)
  3. Value capture on enterprise grade features (ex. Hasura Cloud, Auth0)
  4. Services to support complex integrations

Markets

The cookie cutter network effect thesis.

What is a marketplace?

Marketplaces describe a platform which facilitates a two sided transaction. These assets can be attention, likes, cars, houses, assets etc. The core value proposition of a marketplace is ultimately distribution.

How do marketplaces win?

Marketplaces are created by using a common set of supply levers. New marketplaces win by doing something unique with supply by adjusting levers

  1. Quality of supply
  2. Unit of supply
  3. Market awareness of supply
  4. Supply diversity
  5. Supply discoverability

How can you create supply?

One way is to create tooling to help users create supply and then use this to make a platform play in the future. Substack creating membership tooling for email newsletters, classic social medias creating easy tooling to create content.