Platform vs. Product
Why platforms win, and what product startups can do about it
In the early days, all startups are products. They solve a narrow, painful problem exceptionally well—better than anything that exists. Their advantage is sharpness. They can move fast, iterate quickly, and deliver value to a specific user or team without needing buy-in from the entire org.
But as they grow, they encounter a powerful adversary: the Platform.
The platform doesn’t need to be better. It just needs to be broad. It doesn’t win because it delights users—it wins because it satisfies buyers. The platform is not about elegance; it’s about inevitability. The Platform, in the words of Steve Ballmer is:
“There was IBM man. IBM was still the sun, the moon, and the stars" Source: Acquired
What Is a Platform?
A platform is not just a big product. It’s a unified system that serves multiple use cases across different teams. It offers extensibility, integration, and a coherent architecture that can absorb new features and surface areas without losing control.
Salesforce is a platform. It began as a CRM, but expanded horizontally into service, marketing, analytics, and development tooling. More importantly, it opened itself vertically—via AppExchange and Force.com—to become programmable and integratabtle. That’s when it stopped being a product company and became a gravity well.
Why buyers prefer Platforms
Multi-Use justification
Products often serve one team or use case. Platforms can spread their value across many teams and use cases, they can often span the entire organization. That makes the buying decision easier to justify internally.
One vendor, one contract
Procurement prefers fewer vendors. It reduces compliance surface area, legal overhead, and integration risk. Platforms win here by simplifying the relationship—even if the tools are weaker.
Pricing power through bundling
Platforms can offer “good enough” features for free as part of a broader package. A standalone vendor charging six figures for a specialized tool can’t compete with a bundled checkbox.
Perception of integration
Even if the experience isn’t perfectly integrated, the illusion of cohesion—one UI, one login, one data model—is powerful. Platforms promise harmony, even if it’s shallow.
The result? Buyers choose platforms more often than not. Even when products are better. So, if you’re a startup building a great product, what can you do?
So what can a startup that it at the product stage do to counter a platform? There are four paths that I can think of.
Become a Platform
The first and most ambitious path is to fight fire with fire: build enough surface area to become a platform yourself.
Databricks is the clearest modern example. It started as an execution engine for Apache Spark—focused on distributed compute for data science. Over time, it expanded across every layer of the data stack. It launched Delta Lake its own table format (it also acquired Tabular), then Unity Catalog (governance and security), added Databricks SQL to support traditional BI workloads, and most recently moved into OLTP via its acquisition of Neon. It now serves ML, analytics, storage, security, governance, and transactions—all within one programmable control plane.
Databricks didn’t just build more features. It built a system. It stitched together a coherent and expanding story that let it compete not just with Snowflake on storage and analytics, but with the entire enterprise data platform ecosystem.
Becoming a platform means you have to scale your roadmap, your architecture, and your market narrative—all at once. It is capital intensive, organizationally demanding, and technically non-trivial. But if you succeed, you escape product gravity and create your own.
Become a 100x better Product
If you can’t match breadth, you can still dominate through depth. You can win by being so much better than the platform’s equivalent that buyers are forced to notice—and adopt—even if it creates friction.
Wiz is the canonical example here. The cloud security market is filled with platform incumbents: Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Check Point, and more. But Wiz redefined the category with a radically better product. It was agentless, deployed via cloud provider APIs, and delivered full-stack visibility within minutes. It worked across AWS, Azure, and GCP without deep installation work. No agents, no fragmentation, no stitching together consoles.
Wiz didn’t try to integrate with the legacy platforms. It ignored them. Instead, it focused on clarity, speed, and usability. In doing so, it made everything else look slow and bloated. That strategy powered it from launch to a $10B+ valuation in less than five years, culminating in a $32B acquisition offer from Google.
This approach works when the buyer is facing a deep enough pain that “good enough” won’t do. It works when your product reframes expectations, not just improves metrics. But being 100x better isn’t easy. It means you can’t just be faster—you have to be unignorable.
Own a niche the Platform ignores
Most platforms follow the money. They build for large markets and common denominators. That creates white space—edges and verticals where they can’t, or won’t, focus.
Dremio may represent this play. Competing with Snowflake and Databricks on performance or ecosystem is difficult. But there's a niche hiding in plain sight: on-premises Hadoop modernization.
There are still thousands of enterprises running on-premises Hadoop clusters—many of them large, complex, and too risky to “lift and shift.” Snowflake and Databricks are largely cloud-native, and neither has invested deeply in hybrid execution or transitional architectures. Dremio, with its roots in Apache Arrow and focus on data lake query acceleration, could position itself as the best migration bridge for organizations stuck on Cloudera-era tech.
Being a niche player means accepting a smaller TAM. But it also means less competition, more defensibility, and longer customer retention—especially if the niche is underserved and high-margin. Niches can also be acquisition targets for Platforms. A Platform player might want to acquire a Niche player to extend its Platform into an area the Niche serves.
Become a zombie
The final option isn’t really a strategy—it’s what happens by default if you do nothing.
You stay a product. The platform copies your feature. Or gives it away for free. Or makes the buyer feel like your existence is friction, not leverage. You become a zombie.
Without enough differentiation, and without ecosystem leverage, you drift into procurement purgatory. You get cut in every budget cycle. Your ACVs shrink. Your growth stalls. And eventually, your best customers churn—because they were only using you until the platform was “good enough.”
This is the quadrant nobody wants to be in—but one many startups find themselves in without realizing it.
So What should you do?
In retrospect, the most successful startups almost always follow one of two paths: they either become platforms, or they become 100x better products. That’s where outsized outcomes live. That’s how you change the game.
Becoming a platform gives you gravity. Becoming a 100x product gives you velocity. One lets you pull others into your orbit. The other lets you break free from theirs.
But not every startup can get there.
Becoming a platform requires capital, long-term vision, and organizational range. You need to build surface area fast enough that your expansion feels like momentum, not distraction. That’s not just a roadmap problem—it’s a team, execution, and funding challenge.
Becoming a 100x product demands deep product insight, technical elegance, and absolute clarity about what pain you’re solving. It often means ignoring everything that doesn’t contribute to core value—and enduring the friction that comes from standing outside the ecosystem.
If you can't do either, the next best option is to own a niche. A narrow but defensible segment. A vertical where the platform is weak or absent. A buyer persona overlooked by the mainstream. You won’t win the market, but you can win a market—and build a durable business on that footing.
But there’s no dignity in drifting.
If you fail to choose, you end up in the dead zone. Not differentiated enough to command attention. Not integrated enough to ride coattails. Not focused enough to dominate a niche. You become a zombie—just good enough to stay alive, but not good enough to grow.
So choose. Choose boldly and early. Be a platform. Be a 100x product. Own a niche. But whatever you do, don’t drift into irrelevance hoping the market will notice. It won’t.