Building Platform Based Services is the natural path to innovation and building products.

It's been a year now since I stopped working for someone else's goal.

That's half true at least. Because, when you run a service based business, your service provides a solution for someone else's goal to be achieved. But, I guess that's true for everything that provides value (Thinking out loud here).

Take flowfully.io's example. FlowFully is the service business that generates most of my income at the moment. It is a Platform Based Service. The platform? Webflow.

Platform Based Services Have Been Around Forever

Since the beginning of value exchange (or commerce), people have been providing platform based services. Is just that before, we used to call them skills, and that's it. What we call applications today, are what we always called products or things of value.

From Plumbing Service Provider to Plumbing Innovator

That said, a plumber is a person who's skilled in installing, maintaining, and repairing plumbing systems. A plumber's skill is merely the ability to exploit the platform that others consume but don't have the time to maintain or skillset to fix when something goes wrong. So, a plumber's platform are things like pipes, fixtures, and appliances that facilitate the distribution of water, gas, and waste disposal in residential, commercial, and industrial settings.

Not every plumber comes up with a new idea for an innovating pipe system for beach-front housing. However, the plumber who's been working for years fixing pipes in beach-front areas, using those pipes as a platform to trade on his skill, comes across the same problems over and over again until suddenly, he figures out a way to set up the pipes that keeps that problem from happening again.

There's a split though, I'm a big believer in the fact that there is no such thing as a unique idea. I am certain, that when I think of something "new" someone else has already thought about it. And either they have not executed on it, or simply executed on it for themselves.

In the case of our plumbing example, we all know there are many beach-front housing plumbers for many beach-front housing sectors around the world. Chances are, a couple of them came up with the same idea. Let's say three of them did. Here is how those ideas turn into action for each:

• Plumber one: "I'm going to document how I solve this continuous issue, keep it as a manual and make it real easy for me to solve every time I find it in other houses. This way I can do more of these and take the market for myself through speed. I might even sell this to other plumbers."
• Plumber two: "New houses get built all the time in this beach front. They will all have the same problem eventually, and it's going to cost the builders and owners money. I'm sure if you did [this] and [that] you could get it solved forever. I will reduce my clientele and work on a new pipe system on the side based on what I learned and pitch it to the builders."
• Plumber three: "Damn, this problem keeps coming up. I'm sure if you did [this] and [that] you could get it solved forever. But this is what pays the bills I don't have time come up with something new, and besides I'd need to learn about [adjacent skill x] and [adjacent skill y] to make it happen."

Both plumbers, saw and fixed the same problem several times, and came up with ideas to take the solution further.

Here's how that turns out in the long run for each (Assuming the best case scenario for all three plumbers):

• Plumber one: His profits will increase by a lot and he will linearly grow his market cap against his service providing competitors. He is faster and is delivering excellent results for the same price than Plumber 2 and 3. However...
• Plumber two has been working hard all this time on his innovating solution, the same one that Plumber 3 had, but he is actually sacrificing his income, investing his time and executing on the idea. He is taking both out of the market eventually as no new houses will have the old plumbing system.
• Plumber three stuck to his thing, actually forgot he had that brilliant idea until he was slowly being taken over by plumber 1 and realized "damn, that would have been a good idea" and eventually saying "I had that idea" when taken over completely by Plumber 2.

In the end:

• 3 people had the same problem
• 3 people knew how to solve it
• 2 executed on it
  • One with long term gain in mind
  • One with short term gain in mind
• 3 were left out of a job
  • 2 without something to gain
  • 1 gaining perpetually

Bringing it back to FlowFully

The morale of this story is the reflection I have on AI overtaking the web application and website building space. Previously overtaken by low-code and no-code tools like Webflow (Plumbers of type 1).

• Website and WebApp Building is my plumbing skill.
• Webflow is my platform (Beach front pipe systems).
• Documenting the piping problem for rapid solutions is like using AI to accelerate my growth in the short term within Webflow.
• Building the new piping system is like using the new AI capabilities to build websites and applications of my own device and for my own gain. Emancipating myself from the platform (The piping system).

Moreover, this does not happen if you are not aware of what's missing in current applications/websites.

So will FlowFully, my Webflow as a Service business die?

In the short term (Next 1-3 years). No. Many websites (houses) have been built with Webflow, and will continue to be built with Webflow. I have my speed system (Like plumber 1) which will help me leverage AI (the new pipe system driver) to provide faster and better services. However, I am reducing the time I spend on FlowFully to leverage AI for building products (New pipe systems), because I cannot depend on an existing pipe system for my business to run.

That is how Providing Platform Based Services can become key to product innovation.

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Let me know what you think of this. I reply to all messages and emails.

If you ever feel like discussing something interesting, my calendar is always open for good conversations.

This is Diego's Notes. Thank you for reading all the way through.

See you in the next note.