Sustaining Platform Value

This concluding chapter of platform startups discusses how to use the user’s emotions to keep them onboard. The journey of the platform startup evolves to gradually own increasing slices of the user’s time. These enable the platform to become partially closed over time, locking out future competitors from accessing the market. A startup’s opportunity to capture value depends on its ability to recognise how value will transition over time. This chapter provides guidelines on how to recognise this. The ‘R Value’, which was originally used to track the risk of the COVID pandemic to spread, also provides an indicator of the scalability of platform startups.