Platform Product

Owned by Eliot Muir
Last updated: Sept 23, 2021
1 min read

What differentiates a platform product versus a more well defined product?

Iguana is platform product, in that it is so flexible that it can do many many things, but it doesn’t do an awful lot out of the box relative to say a dental practice management system or any other more “retail product”.

What are the challenges this poses for selling such a product? Potential negative outcomes of how a platform product can be sold:

  • The client captures all the value

    • They pay cents on the dollar for it and then get a ton of value from the product which we don’t share in.

  • The client extracts no value

    • Some uninspired developer that would rather be polishing their resume with C# development, uses it wrong, writes off Iguana and it sits on the shelf.

  • The product is oversold

    • It can do anything but they get us to write a custom EMR in it at cost.

    • One gets into professional services - high revenue for us, but at high cost, so we lose money - i.e. low margin client.

So all this means that:

  • There is high value, but

  • It requires much greater skill in the process of how the product is positioned, marketed, sold and how account management is done.