Business strategy
Building a business on a platform you do not control
Max Dunn, CEO of Silicon Publishing, explains how two decades on Adobe InDesign taught him to live with platform risk and spread it across products.
The Grant Golestan Podcast | Max Dunn CEO of Silicon Publishing
Video from Grant Golestan.
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How do you protect a business built on another company's platform?
Accept that the platform owner can change the rules, then limit the damage. Max Dunn keeps his own document models separate from Adobe's, stays close to the engineers who build the software, and spreads revenue across three products, many partners and several client types, so one platform shift hurts one line of business rather than the whole company.
Max Dunn has spent more than twenty years building software on top of a product he does not own. His company, Silicon Publishing, automates Adobe InDesign, and Adobe has been a client and partner since the day the company opened. That relationship gave the business its foundation, and it also left it exposed to decisions made by someone else.
Speaking on The Grant Golestan Podcast, Dunn described the relationship as a double-edged sword. On one side sits what he calls the greatest engine on earth for making documents. On the other sits a partner large enough to wipe out a smaller firm simply by adding a feature to its own product and giving it away.
His answer has not been to walk away from the platform. Instead, he has spent years reducing how much any single change can hurt. The lessons apply to any founder whose product depends on an app store, an API, a cloud provider or a larger partner that sets the rules.
Key takeaways
- Building on a strong platform gives a small firm power it could never build alone, but the platform owner still controls the rules.
- Keep your own data and document models separate from the platform so the core of your product can move if it has to.
- Stay close to the people who build the platform, because those relationships give early warning of changes that could hurt you.
- Spread revenue across products, partners and client types so one shift damages one line of business, not the whole company.
1. Why build on someone else's platform at all
Dunn and his cofounder started Silicon Publishing in 2000 with two people and no funding. They could not afford the publishing software they had used at their previous employer. Adobe hired them on the first day, and its new product, InDesign, was affordable and worked well, so they mastered InDesign automation in about a week and never looked back.
That choice set the direction of the business for the next two decades. When Adobe released InDesign Server in 2005, Silicon Publishing helped announce and benchmark it and was among its first resellers. Dunn says the company is now the largest reseller of the product, and when Adobe moved development to India in 2009, his team took on many of the Seattle engineers who had built it.
The benefit is obvious to him. A two-person company could never have built a document engine of that quality, and Adobe had spent years on fonts, color, geometry and print output. By building on it, Silicon Publishing could focus on the last mile: the data flowing in, the outputs flowing out and the speed that large clients such as Hallmark and Shutterfly need.
2. The risk of a partner that can replace you
The same dependence is what keeps Dunn alert. Adobe wants to sell more copies of its software, and Silicon Publishing helps by finishing solutions Adobe does not want to build. Yet he calls the relationship awkward and tenuous, because Adobe could extend its own product, bundle a similar feature for free and remove the reason customers pay a smaller partner.
He has seen it happen to others. Crystal Reports grew by shipping with every copy of Microsoft Visual Basic, until Microsoft announced SQL Server Reporting Services and gave it away. Twitter once offered an API that whole startups were funded to build on, then stopped supporting it. In both cases, the partner that had helped those companies grow was the one that undercut them.
Silicon Publishing faced its own version when Flash died. The company's online editor, Silicon Designer, had been built in Flash, and once it was clear Flash would not run on the iPad, the product had to be rebuilt in HTML5. Getting text to work across every browser and device took a year and several engineers, far longer than the two months first planned.
3. How to limit the damage
Dunn's first defence is technical. Silicon Publishing keeps its own document models and maps them onto Adobe's, rather than tying everything directly to Adobe's format. If a strong alternative to InDesign appears, the same models could be mapped to it. He is candid that no rival yet matches Adobe for print quality, so the mapping works as insurance rather than an exit plan.
His second defence is closeness. The company stays in constant contact with the Adobe engineers in India, has visited them in person, and follows where Adobe is heading in every area that touches its products. That relationship gives early warning, and it means Silicon Publishing is part of many Adobe products rather than tied to a single one that could be cut.
The third is diversification, a lesson he learned after nearly failing when the firm depended on one big client. Silicon Publishing now sells three products, Paginator, Designer and Connector, through more than 20 partners to clients of different industries and sizes. Dunn also notes that effort and revenue rarely line up, so a simple product can pay the rent while a hard one matures.
