Plattformen als Distributionskanäle

VC Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures, Investor unter anderem in Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy) in seinem viel zitierten Marketing-Artikel über die Bedeutung von Plattformen, bzw. hier im Speziellen APIs:

Developers – I’ve said many times that developers are the new power users. Twitter is the iconic example. By launching with an almost totally open plaform and a dead simple API, Twitter got thousands of developers to build products that had „Twitter inside.“ Those developers and their products pulled Twitter into the market. Soundcloud is another great example. There are a ton of apps that people use to create music and other audio experiences that have „soundcoud inside.“ Each and every one of those apps is a distribution channel for soundcloud. They are pulling Soundcloud into the market. So build your product as platform from day one. And once you get traction on your product, do things that will cause it to become a platform, Foursquare is doing this well. They first got millions of users and now they are developing a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. They did a hackday this past weekend that was very successful.

Ich würde nicht empfehlen, von Anfang eine Plattform anzubieten. Das ist in den meisten Fällen nicht notwendig. Aber für die meisten Startups gilt, dass die Evolution zur Plattform in der Roadmap von Anfang an drin sein sollte. Wie Wilson bereits schreibt: Sobald das eigene Produkt eine gewisse Verbreitung hat, wird es Zeit die Plattform zu implementieren.