Porter reposted this
Looking for a co-founder to stop having to string together dozens of tools to go-to-market
You focusing on your moat might be what prevents you from selling. For example I end up giving my money to Porter BECAUSE they don't lock me into their ecosystem. Because they didn't focus on their moat, I am buying from them. Porter is a platform as a service like Heroku, but the big difference is I own my infra, they're just helping me manage it. I call that a transparent wrapper. An example of wrapper nontransparent would be Vercel. It's a wrapper on AWS, but you can't see your AWS instance. Why does all this matter? I believe when you start a company it's very useful to rely on other pieces in an ecosystem. For example Bluewind will rely on Appsmith to allow people to contribute to a no-code app, n8n for the no-code backend, Smartlead for the email automation. By doing so, we remove the barriers for people to use our product because we work with industry leaders. The downside is we're not building a moat. But honestly, fuck the moat. Customers don't care about your moat. Only investors do. Before optimizing for enterprise value, optimize for customer value. PS: We have a new company coming in the bluewind stack. We thought a lot about it, this was a big decision. This is HubSpot. It's a key player in the GTM space. Bluewind not having a CRM to push the leads to is a problem. By having Hubspot we can finally close the loop and provide a great experience, all be it opinionated. They have a very generous startup plan that allows companies to not pay too much until they make the big bucks. This means Bluewind will be a transparent wrapper of Smartlead for prospection and Hubspot for nurturing. PS2: nothing prevents you from building your own things and creating your moat once you're established. For example Porter just released Porter Cloud 😉
Founder & CEO at Nomorede | Innovation & Entrepreneurship
3moKaushik Gupta