Coopetition means cooperating with a competitor where your interests overlap while competing with them everywhere else. The term was popularised by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff’s 1996 book Co-opetition, which applies game theory to business and makes the point that the same company can be your competitor in one respect and your partner in another.
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.
Coopetition examples#
The well-known examples are all big companies. Samsung makes many of the OLED screens in iPhones while selling Galaxy phones against them. Netflix moved its streaming systems onto Amazon Web Services, finishing in 2016, while competing with Amazon’s own Prime Video for the same evenings on the sofa. Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari, and Android goes after the same phone buyers as the iPhone. In each case both sides decided the shared slice was worth more than keeping the rival at arm’s length.
A startup’s version is smaller and more lopsided. You cooperate with a platform because you need its users, and you compete with it for their attention. Early on it’s almost all cooperation; the question is when to start leaning the other way.
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, which is rather the point of coopetition. 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.