1. Establish your customer software stack

Where does your product and company fit in your customers' SW stack?

Who are you

• Competing with

• Complementing

• Building for

Business apps and services are consumed directly by the business.

This includes niche SaaS offerings covering various business processes and Business-specific data AI solutions.

Examples: Salesforce, Marketo, Adobe, Netsuite, SAP, and Oracle.

Tech infrastructure and tools are consumed by technologists either within the company or on behalf of the company. Tools targeted at tech builders and practitioners and that don’t touch the business user directly.

This includes cloud software stacks for developers to build cloud native apps; data platforms for data engineers to build data pipelines, reports, and monitoring; and AI

Business platforms bridge the two categories. Here, the software stack acts as a platform that serves both the business users with some ready-made apps as well as the developers who can use lower-level primitives (e.g. APIs and open source frameworks) to build custom use cases.

Examples include the Stripe payment platform for merchants, industrial IOT stacks for frontline manufacturers, gaming stacks like Unity for gamers, and marketing stacks like Adobe for marketers.