on switching costs
Shiny object syndrome is real. And it has real consequences if you’re not careful.
Aside from lost productivity and time spent chasing some strange “new tool” dopamine fix (Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a new app-oholic), there is a very real cost to leaving some products.
That cost is built in. It’s shrewd. A little bit devious. And a lotta-bit great for business. For some products, churn is almost harder on the customer than the product owner.
I’m talking about products we use to create public-facing assets that we want to live forever. Things like product demos, screenshare videos, webinars, external chat, even contracts and other signed docs.
Tools like Arcade, Loom, WebinarJam, Slack, and Docusign—they’re great products. I like each of them and find it hard to think about doing things without them. Heck, I recommend them.
Some of these tools I use because of shiny object syndrome. Others because of last-minute panic searching for an e-signature tool that just works and doesn’t require a credit card…
Once you use a tool like this and the output is shared publicly, it’s hard to stop using that tool. Pepper the internet with Arcade demos and all of a sudden it’s hard to remember where you put them all and how you’d replace them if you close your account.
I’d consider moving off Slack if I didn’t have to tell all my Slack Connect buddies that we have to find another way to chat.
You see what I mean? Switching costs are often thought of in terms of people and process. How do we get our people to adopt a new tool? How do we work it into our current processes?
That switching cost is real. But so too is the cost of tracking, managing, and ideally replacing all of the public-facing stuff many apps let us build. Asset management—ugh.
Before signing up for a new app that makes it easy to embed itself everywhere, consider the cost of ending your relationship with that app. It could be a slippery and potentially costly slope to fall down.
Peter
(397 / 500)
PS: Also, you might not be the one to end the relationship. Companies go out of business, get bought, change pricing, etc. Bottom line, be careful of the long term costs of buying certain products.