Your Neighborhood Already Has a Soccer Team

The neighborhood has a soccer team. Your kids might be on it. Nobody assumes the neighborhood soccer team will replace Real Madrid — but nobody assumed your SaaS would have to compete with something assembled by a thirteen-year-old over a long weekend, either.

That's where we are. Two companies can build nearly identical products, ship them to the same customers, at roughly the same cost. The assembly is no longer the accomplishment.

So the only thing left is the cult.

Not "community" — that word has been sanded down to mean a Slack channel with forty lurkers and one guy who keeps posting his GitHub link. A cult. People who paint their faces in your brand colors. Who get unreasonably angry when someone calls your competitor "basically the same thing." Who name their kid after a clever class function in your repo and feel this is a normal decision.

Basically the same thing is going to be the permanent condition of most software from here on out. The question is who has the fans when it happens to you.

Here's the part that should keep the incumbents up: some folks cheer louder for the little league team than they'd ever bother for the majors. Not because the little league team is better — they're not, obviously — but because their kid is on it, because they helped drag the equipment out of the storage shed, because their loyalty feels personal instead of demographic.

That is a structural advantage a large company with a mature product and a healthy renewal rate cannot purchase.

If you're building software right now and you're roadmapping features, you're already behind whoever is building fans.