Not Boring tells startups to build the one product an incumbent loses money by copying

Take the essay at its word and roadmap items get ranked by what copying them would cost the incumbent. Corporate cards make that concrete. Cards that pay points earn more when customers spend more, so matching a product built to cut spend means booking less revenue ^[4][5].

Not Boring gives two reasons the incumbents could not follow Ramp, and only one is about incentives. They were "nowhere as good at software", the essay says, and the main obstacle was that if customers spent less, the incumbents made less, which their shareholders would not appreciate ^[5]. Product quality sits inside the worked example, in an essay whose premise is that being faster and better at product is not a strategy ^[3].

The counter-evidence is in the essay too. Divvy and Brex offered rewards and points for spend, the same game the incumbents played, and Bill.com bought Divvy for $2.5bn while Capital One bought Brex for $5.15bn ^[6][7][8]. That is $7.65bn between them, against the $44bn Ramp is valued at now, or roughly 5.8 times ^[9][10]. The comparison sets a private valuation beside two closed purchase prices, which are not the same kind of number.

Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell put the idea in physical terms in a conversation with David Senra. "If you're going to take on an incumbent," he said, "my view is the best way to do it is to have a counter-positioned business model" ^[11]. Selling the best home battery at 10% under the big guys invites one response: "First they're going to copy my product, then they're going to drop their price and they're going to run me out of business," he said ^[13]. His alternative was "I don't sell batteries. I sell electricity," with a battery installed on the customer's home for one twentieth or even one fortieth of what buying it outright would cost ^[12]. Following him there, Dell said, would mean an incumbent completely changing its business model, which for a public company is very hard ^[14].

For a team picking between two features on Monday, the usable form of this is a two-by-two. One axis is whether the incumbent can build it. The other is whether shipping it shrinks revenue the incumbent already books. If it is easy for them to build and costs them nothing, expect it in their next release. If it is hard to build and costs them nothing, expect a purchase offer instead, and the Divvy and Brex prices set the going rate ^[7][8]. Easy to build but revenue-negative is where Ramp sat, holding a product incumbents could technically copy and financially could not ^[4][5]. Hard and revenue-negative is the strongest cell, and it is still temporary: Not Boring says Base will not be able to use counter-positioning forever, and that the moats protecting its margins later will come from scale economies, cornered resources, switching costs and brand ^[15].