Every platform I built on is gone

The first place I had an audience was MySpace. It was, at the time, obviously permanent. Not in the sense that anyone said so — in the sense that nobody thought to ask.

It's now a punchline. Everything anyone built there is functionally gone, along with whatever relationships and reach came with it.

That should have been the formative lesson of my career. Instead I treated it as a one-off, an amusing artifact of the early internet, and went right on building on top of the next thing.

The pattern, laid out#

MySpace to Facebook. Audience gone, start over. I told myself this was a transition rather than a lesson.

Organic Facebook reach. For a stretch, a page with followers was a distribution channel you could actually run a store on. Then the feed algorithm changed and the reach you'd accumulated was worth a fraction of what it had been, and the difference was available for purchase. Nobody breached a contract. There was no contract.

Paid acquisition costs. Every channel I've bought on has followed the same arc — cheap and inefficient, then efficient, then crowded, then expensive. The window where a channel is mispriced is the entire opportunity, and it closes on someone else's schedule.

Exposely's supply side. The creators we depend on exist at the pleasure of platforms that change their distribution rules whenever it suits them. A reach algorithm change doesn't just affect one creator's income. It repriced our entire inventory overnight, and we found out the same way everyone else did.

Four instances. Same shape. I've been treating each one as weather.

What I actually did wrong#

It isn't that I built on platforms. There was no alternative, and there mostly still isn't — the platforms are where the people are, and a business that refuses to go where the people are is a hobby.

It's that I never priced it. In every case I made plans that assumed the current arrangement would persist, and then I was surprised, and being surprised repeatedly at the same thing is not bad luck. It's a failure to update.

A more honest version would look like: this revenue depends on a rule that someone else controls and can change without telling me. Therefore it's worth less than the same revenue from a source I control. Therefore I should take money off the table earlier, avoid hiring against it, and never let it become the only thing.

I've never once done that arithmetic. I don't think most people do. The revenue arrives looking exactly like every other kind of revenue.

The part I don't have an answer to#

If you take this seriously, the conclusion is to build somewhere you own the ground, and I've never been able to make that work as an actual business.

The places you own are small. The places you don't own are where everyone is. Every real company I know of is standing on someone else's floor, including the platforms themselves — they're standing on browsers and app stores and payment networks that can change the rules on them.

So it isn't "don't build on platforms." It's something more like: know exactly which layer you're on, know what a rule change would do to you, and notice the difference between a platform change that costs you a quarter and one that removes your reason to exist.

I don't know how to tell those two apart in advance yet. I'd guess it's about whether your product uses the platform or whether your product is a behavior of the platform. That's the closest I've gotten and it's still a feeling rather than a test.

I'm writing this down so that the next time it happens I can at least say I saw the shape of it.