🛣️ The two ditches

Along roads, there is often a ditch or some undesirable obstacle on either side of the road you want to avoid. The same can be said for most of life, including product development. There are two common errors:

• Build it all yourself: You drown in plumbing, becoming a full-time maintainer of what others maintain better. There are other variations of this such as build everything entirely from source, etc.
• Rent the whole thing: You base your product on someone else's platform and lose the ability to own your destiny: can't swap components, hostage to their roadmap, pricing, and lifecycle.

The art of platform thinking is to optimize the path between these two extremes.