When Slack launched a competing feature, Polly realized being a single-platform app was an existential threat. They survived by expanding to Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, transforming from a 'Slack poll app' into a multi-surface engagement platform, thereby de-risking their business.
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OpenAI embraces the 'platform paradox' by selling API access to startups that compete directly with its own apps like ChatGPT. The strategy is to foster a broad ecosystem, believing that enabling competitors is necessary to avoid losing the platform race entirely.
Dropbox's shrinking revenue illustrates a key strategic risk. Despite being an iconic product, it became a feature within larger ecosystems like Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. Its failure to expand into a defensible, multi-product platform (e.g., failed Mailbox and Carousel acquisitions) led to its current stagnation.
Startups often fail to displace incumbents because they become successful 'point solutions' and get acquired. The harder path to a much larger outcome is to build the entire integrated stack from the start, but initially serve a simpler, down-market customer segment before moving up.
After realizing most users creating casual polls for lunch spots would never pay, Polly found its premium market. They targeted users responsible for expensive, high-stakes events like company all-hands and sales kickoffs, where the value of instant feedback was undeniable and justified the cost.
To grow an established product, introduce new formats (e.g., Instagram Stories, Google AI Mode) as separate but integrated experiences. This allows you to tap into new user behaviors without disrupting the expectations and mental models users have for the core product, avoiding confusion and accelerating adoption.
Calendly is expanding beyond its core scheduling function to address the full meeting process. They are developing solutions for meeting preparation, in-meeting engagement, and post-meeting follow-ups. This strategy of expanding horizontally around a core user problem illustrates a powerful path for SaaS growth.
Polly's core viral loop wasn't just about initial adoption. They discovered that 12% of users who first interacted with the product by responding to a poll would then become creators themselves, creating a compounding, multi-generational growth engine within organizations.
Smaller software companies can't compete with giants like Salesforce or Adobe on an all-in-one basis. They must strategically embrace interoperability and multi-cloud models as a key differentiator. This appeals to customers seeking flexibility and avoiding lock-in to a single vendor's ecosystem.
Don't just sell a product; become an indispensable part of your customer's workflow. By offering integrated products and services, you create a value ecosystem that locks out competitors and makes leaving an impractical and undesirable option.
The existential threat from large language models is greatest for apps that are essentially single-feature utilities (e.g., a keyword recommender). Complex SaaS products that solve a multifaceted "job to be done," like a CRM or error monitoring tool, are far less likely to be fully replaced.
