That’s the advice you hear often in the indie maker and software world. Never build your house on someone else’s land. Never build your business on someone else’s platform. Yes, while there’s opportunity to be leveraged from using platforms like say Facebook to build your audience, or a business, depending entirely on it makes your business vulnerable.

Just like how people who depended on using Facebook as a platform to reach their customers. Whenever Facebook changes their social feed algorithm, their reach is affected. And they had very little say over it. That’s the vulnerability. You relinquish autonomy and control in exchange for the platform effects of a wider reach. 

Trade offs, between scale or control.

That happened to me today. I built my productized service Sweet Jam Sites on a bunch of other SaaS offering free tiers – Stackbit, Netlify, Github. And today, Stackbit just reduced their theme options, and removed NetlifyCMS as an option for headless CMS. Those were important ingredients of my productized service business. With less options means my offerings decrease. While the service had not exactly ramped up much, it makes me shudder to think, “What if it changes even more in the future, when they need to start monetising? What if Netlify and Github start doing that too?”

Too much uncertainty, too little control over my fate.

I’m not so sure anymore about this business model I have. Perhaps it’s time to divest and set things up by myself, using more stable or paid services that I have more control over. 

A wake up call indeed, when the bulldozer shows up on your door and there’s nothing you can do but to watch it slowly tear down your precious house.