Week 943

Matt Kirkland

It's Week 943!

This week we were telling project stories, and I was reminded of a compelling one that we haven't discussed much. I'll anonymize this a bit here, not to protect a secret identity, but because I was struck at how universally applicable this plot might be.

We work with an client. Our friends here are a relatively young startup, but growing. Their work involves network effects and clusters of connected users, they've seen growth in both how they deliver value to those users, and how those clusters are multiplying.

But there's an 800 pound gorilla in the room. A large incumbent, one that's already captured a lot of the territory. The gorilla is much bigger, much more established, and much better capitalized. Our friends don't do exactly the same thing as the gorilla - but it's close enough that the competition is clear. Like a good insurgent, they've carved out a separate niche. They keep out of the gorilla's way. Mostly.

Until they didn't!

One day a big cluster of their users said: hey, we love working with you. And we also want to work with some other people, we want them to interact with our system... but they're already working with The Gorilla. We don't want to have to switch over to Gorillaware. Do we have to give up your platform and use Gorillaware? Help!

Luckily, computers are pretty good at talking with each other. And because our friends and the Gorilla do very similar things, BNB could devise a way to let these two systems work together.

It takes cooperation between the two sides; it's pretty hard to do this without both platforms playing ball. Technically this isn't very difficult! But by building new interfaces that let data connect, we built and launched a way that Gorilla users and our friends could share their data, and work seamlessly between the two platforms.

The end users got to keep using the systems they liked, our friends got to keep their customers, and most importantly - everyone survived their brush with the Gorilla.