What do you do when a platform ships your feature for free?

Close it cleanly, and quickly. When a platform ships your feature, simpler and free and already inside the thing every customer uses each day, there's rarely anything to argue with. I gave customers 6 weeks' notice, refunded the current month for everybody, and wrote a short guide to moving across to the platform's own version.

The Tuesday changelog

I found out from a changelog. The large platform my tool plugged into had published its monthly list of improvements. Halfway down, between a fix to its search and a new colour for its buttons, was the thing my product did, now built in, for everybody. I read it twice, then made a cup of tea and sat with it for a while. (The tea helped. Slightly.)

The tool did one clumsy job neatly, from the outside, through the platform's own connections. It took a week. Developers liked it, paid a modest monthly price, and stayed. It grew slowly and steadily for a year. Within a few weeks of the changelog the cancellations began, all polite, most saying some version of "the platform does this now".

Why I didn't wait

I could have let it dwindle for months. A slow fade spends your evenings and your customers' patience on something that already has an ending. Closing it while people still liked it meant they remembered it kindly, and one of them became a customer for the next product.

The question to ask before you build

Is the thing you do the kind of thing that appears in that platform's changelog? If your product is a missing feature in somebody else's product, they can ship it on any Tuesday they like.

Before building on a platform, read its last 3 changelogs. If your idea would fit neatly among those entries, it's a feature waiting to be absorbed. Look for jobs the platform has no reason to do: work that's specific to one trade, or that crosses several platforms at once.

Nobody Bought It has the autopsy, including the public numbers page I ran for it. The rules page has the rule it left.