Product-shaped or movement-shaped?

Yesterday I wrote about how the value for a product or service’s community may be different from the thing that drives its creators to build it — and unlocking and understanding that difference could be part of the key to making it sustainable.The people building Bluesky might be excited to be creating a decentralized protocol and an open source platform, but it’s not a given that the people already using Bluesky care all that much about that. For them, it might be more important that there’s a real alternative to big tech platforms. The Mastodon team might be excited to build a federated platform using open source principles, but Mastodon users might feel more invested in the idea that their social channels are independent from US interests.I want to go a little further and share a hypothesis:Mission-driven founders often think the value of their work is product-shaped when it’s really movement-shaped.Mastodon and Bluesky are often put in the same bucket because, despite their clear…