Feature or a company? →

Came across this link the day before and it seriously got me thinking. At the end of the post, it rings the bell..

If your app relies on a 3rd party for survival, you’re building a feature and you’re a dead man walking.  You don’t determine your future, the 3rd party does.  They can cripple you by competing with you, or simply changing their Terms of Use.  Stop coding, stop improving the product, put down the keyboard and step away from the desk.

This means “The Feature” is what I am building today. Since december 2007, my core focus has been to build quality premium themes that works with WordPress blog/CMS platform. Yes, most of the products are not free and we do earn money selling them. But there’s no denying that these products ultimately adds value to WordPress. The harder we work, the more wordpress achieves in the end.

But what if?

What if things go bad some how and the WordPress founders decide not like us? The company’s future would be entirely on their hands and it doesn’t really matter how much time or years I have put in building a company. Ofcourse this is a superficial imagination but we need to consider this while day and night you are building something which is adding value for someone else’s product and you are not 100% in control.

My take on this

Yes, our products do sell because of WordPress and it would be foolish to stop building products which are already working. My take on this one would be to build something entirely different ever so slowly on the side.

Are you adding feature to someone else’s company? What are your thoughts?