Business Dependency can ruin your business over night

Before we started MixCommerce we were heavily invested in the Affiliate business. Google was pushing algorithm updates every year in this industry and in 2022, the final update took down most of the affiliate sites.

For us, Google ruined more than 75% of traffic, we had to fire 23+ people in a single day. A very sad moment for me in business. We built the team from scratch, we had no other choice but to let them go or shut down in a few months. We took the decision that protected the business.

What you read above is called business dependency and it can kill your business in a “single day”. This is why diversification is important.

So, shall use start building Google?

That’s definitely a good product to start.

One-sided power is never good for people.

I personally think, there should be at least 3 more google competitors holding around 25% of power so they can compete with each other. Each is owned by a different entity. Each of them should be allowed to update their algorithm only once a year but in different quarters. Different quarters so that a small business can have a max impact of 25% in a single quarter.

This will help small business owners grow and will help the economy grow faster. Why, and how does it affect small businesses?

The digital revolution has started in India and people have started going digital.

Google has a monopoly in search, it does things that benefit them and updates the algorithm as per its thoughts but it never tells the clear reason why algorithms have been updated. All you get is an unclear summary that doesn’t help businesses.

Small businesses that depend on them suddenly see a drop in traffic, and sometimes it really affects the business very badly. ie: For us, we had to fire most of our people.

We are not alone, the whole industry is being pulled down because of this, and a lot of people who were in this industry preferred to move for a job.

If you observe, it’s a big change role, “From an entrepreneur to being an employee”. If a country wants people to start businesses, it should have an atmosphere where businesses can thrive, not go back and get a job.

Wouldn’t starting from scratch take a lot of time? 

I would not say everything should start from scratch, you definitely need to pick up the programming language, and framework and build your product.

This will take time to build a product, marketing, and asset but holding the power in business is a very important thing to remain alive.  It will take time to start, build a product, market it, and build community and market place but that’s the path of almost any great product.

Understanding the flow, Going slow, and making sure people are adapting is the key to building great products. Once it’s built, you will most likely be in a position to control your future.

Having this control will protect your business and allow you to add other products and create a product mesh. We will talk about product mesh in this article.

Before you go and start one, I want you to understand that

1. It’s almost impossible to build a 100% independent, business. You can get most of the power but 100% isn’t realistic.
2. There are monopolies that should be broken to equate power and create healthy competition

Single Point of Failure Examples

Example 1: 

1. thedigitalhacker.com (Affiliate Algorithm changed its game)
2. lyrics.com (Google took over, they can’t control it)
3. yelp.com google took info directly and prevented users to land on the site. When yelp complained, google told yelp to deindex their site if they don’t want its info to appear on Google”

How businesses are trying to control and own the audience?

1. Owning content (Youtube, owns most videos on its platform)
2. Owning Connection (Facebook, Family Connection)
3. Owning Specific Demographic (Linkedin, Business content)
4. Making paid product Free (Rankmath made free features and took on Yoast SEO)
5. Making paid products open source (making salesforce open source, frapee)
6. Copying feature from a competitor (Insta copied Snapchat, TikTok | Google copied meetings, forced people to use | Google copied short videos)
7. Making it Hard to migrate (Every tech company)
8. Building a marketplace (Shopify)
9. Building Community  (Harness.io)
10. Open-sourcing tools (MongoDB)
11. Open-sourcing and Dual Licencing (Elastic Search)
12. Building Loyalty and Soft Power (Doesn’t really exist, It’s in the end because people move out for benefits, and very few people follow)

Adapting(copying) the exact feature has become a good strategy for big tech

When you startup, investors will often ask you the “USP”?

The point is “while big conglomerates are busy copying the features from their competitors” the VCs are asking for USP. Turns out, it’s not the USP game, it’s about controlling the audience, let be any strategy businesses are really to make it happen for a profit. I don’t see anything wrong with that if the maker and consumer are happy.

1. Google’s Youtube copied TikTok once TikTok was ranked no 1 in 2021 src
2. Insta copied stories features from Snapchat back in 2016 src
3. Linkedin is copying features from Facebook (like, comment, repost, videos)
4. Twitter copied Clubhouse because it became popular

Oooh, Dear USP……… You likely don’t exist and when you do, everyone copies it.

Can you sit and just run your company?

Likely no! You likely have to become part of this to protect your users and bring new users. UGC content creation and Audience Control will likely be one of the best ways businesses will control the creator and the audience.

General Behaviour always plays a key role in product adaption 

1. Spending Money to make more money
2. Spending money to save more money

With that, you can understand the reason why people adopt free platforms over overpaid one and this is one of the best ways to make people use the product

1. Free platform over the paid platform (Youtube over Udemy)
2. An open-source software (WordPress over Wix)
3. A free SEO plugin (Rankmath over YoastSEO)
4. Making the lead puller free and building a CRM on top of it

Building core tech is important but the more important part is “building things that don’t let the users go away”. This necessarily doesn’t mean user locking but any one of the above points.

In building a product that is loved by the community, content is created and then once the product is popular, a paid version is released. These things cannot be copied.

How do businesses make money out of free content?

1. Small businesses die, and big platforms often win.
2. How businesses are protecting their users?

It’s not about USP (LOL), It’s about how you can take over!

A lot of investors talk about USP to people who start their

Mostly, It’s about being unique it’s about holding existing users and gaining more.

Example 1: Quora – Delbarately pushing to use App

1. Quora forces readers to log in when users are browsing from a desktop (that’s the best they can)
2. The same Quora forces people to download app when they are browsing from a phone browser

Whom do they fear?

Of course, google! Google tried copying them and failed badly. Having said that, it doesn’t mean google will not retry.

[screenshot to be attached]

Example 2: Salesforce, ZOHO – Protected by Default Businesses

[Screenshot showing direct traffic on ZOHO from search, social and direct]

Salesforce and ZOHO are business apps that are used by businesses to run their day-to-day operation. People don’t have to land on google once they become customers.

Even if google changes its algorithm, people will continue to lang on salesforce and use the product. This kind of strength should be built from the very beginning. Sometimes, it will be almost impossible to avoid.

So, Should you remove Google from your business equation?

Not really, that will be a big mistake.

Here are the things that should be done to improve

1. Use Google only as a customer acquisition channel not to run your day-to-day business
2. Keep the business name, and website URL easy to remember and make sure users are getting to know your brand
3. As the complexity grows, make sure people use your product and most importantly can use your core product directly through URL, and App.
4. Build Authority, Don’t just remain on core business. Start expanding and bring 1st layer of related products into the business
5. Take action to improve Branding (Free tools for customer community, photos for community)

How to build the product so you can lead your own path not others?

1. Build core products usable, customizable, integrative, and most importantly fulfilling

Building the core products to fulfill the base need is very important. Plugins, themes and customization, and personalization should be the key considerable factors.

For us, our products are around marketing and our initial product is MixCRM.

2. Build Product Mesh

Building a product mesh around a specific industry is the core of gaining authority and leading the market. This way, you will be able to deliver accurate product integration, and versioning and most importantly help businesses in cutting their overall cost.

ZOHO is the best example of this. It has built products around business use cases, and after 55+ products down the line, they are leading the space and engineering-wise, likely ahead of salesforce.

3. Marketplace

Android is open source but not the play store. It’s a platform game. Google basically controls the android market, they tried to take over desktops with chrome OS too but it was a big mess.

1. Should extend the feature of the product
2. Should allow the public to submit their themes, plugins
3. Core product should have enough reach to attract developers and designers to the platform
4. Community to build products around it

Marketplace necessarily does not have to be selling a paid product, the plugins and themes can be pushed for free for b businesses to install.

it’s impossible to run a business. Remember Huawei and their HarmonyOS.

4. Build General Usecase products

Specific products are good for niche marketing but specific products never become the mainstream or gain mass adoption.

The best way you can do here is to build with the following measure

1. Core product
2. Plugins
3. Marketplace
4. Open APIs

This will enable the

5. Avoid Single Point of Failure

In Engineering, it’s called a single point of failure. Considering that, we should not build a single point of failure for our businesses.

The core issue with amazon affiliates was that almost 95% of the revenue was dependent on google searches. Once google ranking is owned, we will be out of business.

This was pretty clear but it never felt that way until we have to find a good size of people from the team.

Why in the world I am writing this article?

1. It helps me clear my mind.
2. It helps people who read this blog learn more
3. The content becomes a good reference for me to correct myself when I face issues.