A better product isn't always enough

For over a year I’ve been building Protribe, a networking platform for product, design and engineering people.

The premise felt like a slam dunk. Everyone complains about LinkedIn - the feed is noise, there’s a lot of AI content, the reach is broken. If that many people are unhappy, surely an alternative has a way in.

It turns out building an alternative is not the hard part. Getting people to actually move is where it gets tough.

A stated problem isn’t demand

There is a gap between “this is broken” and “I will switch to your thing”, and I underestimated how wide it is.

People complain about LinkedIn constantly. But complaining is cheap, and it doesn’t translate into people actually moving.

I viewed the complaints as a gap in the market for something new. To be honest, I still do. But wanting an existing platform to improve isn’t the same as people actually being ready to move.

The competitor you’re really fighting is inertia

When you build a challenger, it’s tempting to think you’re competing on features. Better design, better signal, less spam. Build it (better), and they will come.

But the incumbent’s moat isn’t the features. It’s everything the user has already invested. On LinkedIn that’s your connections, your history, your presence, the fact that the people you want to reach are already there. None of that moves just because someone else builds something better.

So the competition isn’t so much with LinkedIn’s product. It’s with the cost of leaving it. And “better” does almost nothing to lower that cost. You could win every feature comparison and still watch people stay exactly where they are. Staying is free and moving is not.

But people do move - when the switch is worth it

People are moving. Just not the way I first thought.

Look at where writers are going. Many now call Substack their home. They’re leaving the old platforms, and not waiting for those platforms to improve. What makes that switch happen?

Substack is a content platform. It’s designed for people who want to have their content in one place. It works for one person, on their own, from the moment they arrive.

You don’t need an audience for a content hub to be valuable. The content is yours, it’s in one place, and it does its job whether ten people read it or ten thousand. If subscribers follow, great, but the tool already earns its keep before any of them show up.

Contrast that with a network whose whole value is other people being there. If it only pays off once everyone has arrived, then no single person’s move pays off on its own - so nobody makes the move. And someone always has to be first, walking into an empty room.

What this means if you’re the challenger

Two things I’m taking from this.

First, don’t sell the destination. Sell the move. Being better is table stakes - the work is making the switch itself cheap and worth it. What does someone get on day one, before anyone else follows?

Second, make early value independent of the crowd. If your product only pays off once everyone’s there, you have a cold-start problem dressed up as a growth problem. The switches that succeed give the user a reason to move before the network arrives - even if they are first.

None of this is a reason to stop, but it has reset our expectations. Protribe hasn’t changed yet - what’s changed is what we know we have to get right. Being the better alternative was never going to be enough on its own. We have to make the purpose and the benefits clear up front, sharpen the messaging, and give people a reason to be there that doesn’t depend on the whole network showing up first.

The complaints were the setup, not the opportunity

I spent a long time assuming the complaints were the opening. They were the setup. The opportunity is in the switch, and the switch is the part I hadn’t spent enough time on.

If you’re building something better than what people already use, that’s worth very little until you’ve answered a harder question: what would actually make someone leave what they have? Answer that, and “better” finally starts to matter.

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