I think it depends on to what extent you allow white labeling. The main risk I can see is that if they have full source code access, or too much control, they can always change all of the branding to OurBetterCrowdControl and start competing with you on price which wouldn't be ideal.
On the other hand, I've seen this strategy work extremely successfully at my previous job (engineering at DoorDash). Back in ~2018-2020, our competitors (Uber, Postmates, etc) were hesitant to allow merchants to serve orders off their own website, whereas we took a different strategy: we had an open API and allowed merchants to use us for "behind the scenes" logistics while providing whatever messaging/experience they wanted to their customers. This allowed us to gain marketshare quickly and eventually many of the merchants that previously didn't want to be on DoorDash.com because they had their own website said "okay, now that we've seen the quality of the product on our own website, let's just list on your marketplace too and get more orders that way" - so it acted as a very effective trojan horse to get big enterprise customers signed on and using the full suite of products.
To be fair, I think your industry is different and I don't think it parallels your problem very closely, but maybe there's something you can take away from this.
Thanks Ben. I don’t think we’d give them the source code in this white label situation, I think we’d even continue to host it so they don’t even get the minified code that’s deployed.
Appreciate your response, it’s certainly different industries but it’s always good to hear about how this worked for others.
In this case, for the other company it’s all about keeping control of the sales/revenue and coins in their creators ecosystem. If a user buys $10 of coins they want the viewer to either not spend it at all thus the coins sit dormant or they are only spent on their creators. That seems like their main reason for this but as I think about it I need to compile a list of things they may need to be aware of with this and have a few different pricing options depending available for them.
Understood - and agreed wrt creating different pricing options. I think it would be helpful to do some additional requirements gathering. What exactly do they want out of a white labeled product besides better pricing/payment infrastructure or is it literally just that? Maybe this is the only thing they care about, but if you can provide additional value with some customization (changing the logo to theirs while leaving a "powered by crowdcontrol" message or similar, using a custom domain, etc) maybe you can charge them for that privilege while also addressing their concern with the credits.
I think it depends on to what extent you allow white labeling. The main risk I can see is that if they have full source code access, or too much control, they can always change all of the branding to OurBetterCrowdControl and start competing with you on price which wouldn't be ideal.
On the other hand, I've seen this strategy work extremely successfully at my previous job (engineering at DoorDash). Back in ~2018-2020, our competitors (Uber, Postmates, etc) were hesitant to allow merchants to serve orders off their own website, whereas we took a different strategy: we had an open API and allowed merchants to use us for "behind the scenes" logistics while providing whatever messaging/experience they wanted to their customers. This allowed us to gain marketshare quickly and eventually many of the merchants that previously didn't want to be on DoorDash.com because they had their own website said "okay, now that we've seen the quality of the product on our own website, let's just list on your marketplace too and get more orders that way" - so it acted as a very effective trojan horse to get big enterprise customers signed on and using the full suite of products.
To be fair, I think your industry is different and I don't think it parallels your problem very closely, but maybe there's something you can take away from this.
Thanks Ben. I don’t think we’d give them the source code in this white label situation, I think we’d even continue to host it so they don’t even get the minified code that’s deployed.
Appreciate your response, it’s certainly different industries but it’s always good to hear about how this worked for others.
In this case, for the other company it’s all about keeping control of the sales/revenue and coins in their creators ecosystem. If a user buys $10 of coins they want the viewer to either not spend it at all thus the coins sit dormant or they are only spent on their creators. That seems like their main reason for this but as I think about it I need to compile a list of things they may need to be aware of with this and have a few different pricing options depending available for them.
Understood - and agreed wrt creating different pricing options. I think it would be helpful to do some additional requirements gathering. What exactly do they want out of a white labeled product besides better pricing/payment infrastructure or is it literally just that? Maybe this is the only thing they care about, but if you can provide additional value with some customization (changing the logo to theirs while leaving a "powered by crowdcontrol" message or similar, using a custom domain, etc) maybe you can charge them for that privilege while also addressing their concern with the credits.