I think about this a fair bit at work, since I’m building a community app that lives in the shadow of much bigger social platforms: do you build on top of the giants, or compete with them? Both can work. The interesting question is when to switch.
Why coexisting first makes sense#
Early on, while you’re still hunting for product-market fit, riding the big platforms is usually the right call. Operating inside an ecosystem that already has users teaches you what people actually want. Integrations with popular platforms give you distribution you couldn’t buy. And you can carve out a niche instead of fighting a giant head-on. PayPal started as a payment option for eBay users, and half the successful apps you can name began as add-ons for Shopify or Slack.
Knowing when to compete#
The shift comes later, once you understand your users better than the platform does. Instagram is the classic case — a photo-filter app that grew into a social platform in its own right. The signs I’d look for: you’ve built genuine domain expertise or technology of your own, and you can see from user behaviour that people want something the incumbents don’t offer. If neither is true yet, competing is just picking a fight you’ll lose.
What this looks like for a community app#
For a community product, coexisting mostly means integration work, and it’s less glamorous than it sounds. Social sign-on, so joining doesn’t require yet another account. Easy sharing of community content out to people’s social feeds — that’s your marketing budget right there. Notifications when someone gets a mention or shout-out on another platform, embeds and widgets so partners can put community features on their own sites, and API hook-ups with complementary services. On the non-technical side, collaborations with influencers who already live on the big platforms, and campaigns that run across several platforms at once, tend to do more for engagement than anything you build in-house.
None of this is binary. Most startups start by coexisting and drift toward competing as they grow — the trick is noticing when you’ve quietly earned the right to make that shift.