There is a very cool article written by a application developer for Blackberry online named Marcus Watkins at VersatileMonkey. It is great because you get a window into the mind of both a developer and a startup company as they determine what platforms to develop for, what feature sets to choose from, how to market, how to price, and how to support his app. It’s like a mini-case study, and there are a lot of key learning’s for budding platforms as well.
Marcus chose to develop on RIM’s platform because of the size of the installed base and relative lack of competition for the app he was considering building (a long format audio player). This validates a key tenant of becoming a platform I outlined in a past post:
The value of your platform to a partner and the likelihood of their developing to it is directly proportional to the amount of business the partner is able to capture through the platform.
However having a ton of potential consumers for your partners to service isn’t enough. One of his first struggles was with RIMs SDK, specifically with regard to backwards compatibility:
All BlackBerry phones are java based, and there are two SDK options for developing software on them: MIDP/CLDC and BlackBerry specific APIs. The generic MIDP/CLDC route would work on any java based phone (or at least could be debugged on any java phone). Or you can opt to use RIM specific APIs that give you more BlackBerry specific functionality. Initially I leaned towards CLDC to maintain portability, but I eventually decided I’d rather take full advantage of the platform. I could always port it later if it came to that (if there is a later).
He also laments the lack of SDK features that would give his app the polish available from other platforms, such as the iPhone:
I envy the iPhone developers out there. From what I understand the iPhone SDK provides all sorts of pretty widgets that come pre-made to fit in with the platform. Right out of the box you get a clean UI that looks ‘modern’. To put PodTrapper 2.0 in the same league a significant portion of the code is dedicated to drawing lines, bezier curves, bitmaps and shading rectangles in just the right way.
There are other great quotes in there about Marcus’s interaction with users (his favorite part), how he chose to price his app, market it, and so on. The point for Product Managers who are building out a platform is that we need to consider the entire lifecycle of a customer when we offer a platform, not just the API or SDK.
When you think about building out a platform, remember that for potential platform partners have several go to market choices. They can build a standalone application and go to market direct. Or they can come through yours or one of many platforms. The size of your installed base (now their market), how frictionless you make sales, and how you take care of them in terms of billing and marketing are also key drivers of success.
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