General: Windows of opportunity beside large companies are often short-lived

I posted yesterday about how a small company can grow by being hired by a large company. But there’s another key opportunity that’s often even bigger.

Smaller companies often find a gap in the offerings of larger companies, and are able to create their own offerings to fill the gap.

Gaps are everywhere

I’ve worked with data for a very long time. And over that time, I’ve seen countless small companies and startups created. So many times, what propels them forward is finding a gap in a popular offering from a large company, and quickly filling that gap with their own offering.

This can be very profitable. The growth of the large company’s product helps to drive the growth of the small company’s gap-filler or extender product.

But opportunities can close quickly too

Just this morning, I was reading a post from a small company who were really upset because the gap they were filling suddenly disappeared. This happened because the larger company added features to their product, that completely removed the need for the small company’s offering.

A company offered a service that transcribed and translated YouTube videos into many languages and automated the process of getting all the translations in place. It made it trivial to point at a video, and have it suddenly be able to be viewed in one of a number of languages. They were complaining that YouTube was now releasing an auto-dubbing service that did all this automatically, for every video on the YouTube site. That made their service completely pointless.

This is tragic, but it’s expected. Once a gap-filling product becomes popular enough, you shouldn’t be suprised that the larger company might just decide to fill the gap themselves. The smaller company doesn’t own that part of the market, and they didn’t even create the gap in the first place.

This can also happen to products that aren’t filling gaps, but are extending the capabilities of the larger company’s product. These add-on products are just as vulnerable as gap-filling products.

Sometimes it’s tactical

It’s worth mentioning that there is one thing that I’ve seen many times over the years, that I do consider somewhat evil. The larger company merely announces that they’re going to release a product that does what the smaller company’s product does. That can be terminal for the smaller company, even if the larger company never releases their own offering.

This can be purely tactical, and sometimes seems downright evil and an abuse of their market size.

What small companies need to do

If your company is doing well by supplying a product that either fills a gap in a large company’s offerings, or extends it in a useful way, you need to accept that the window of opportunity that you identified and filled, might close again just as fast as it opened.

Gaining growth by being dragged along by a larger company is great, but no matter how well you’re doing with your product, you need to be constantly on the lookout for new gaps or opportunities to fill.

Don’t be the one complaining that the larger company is mean or evil because they suddenly decided to fill the opportunity that they created in the first place.

2025-11-13