vs. Practice Fusion
athenahealth
Founders learned billing by running clinics
- What it did
- Bought birthing practices in 1997, could not get paid, built their own billing system
- Practice Fusion
- Founded 2005 as a web EHR by a software entrepreneur
Founder Domain Expertise
What is Founder Domain Expertise?
Founder domain expertise is insider knowledge of the customer's work that founders bring to a new company: from doing that work, building or selling products to those customers, or running a business in the field. It shapes the first product and market choices. Experience only as a customer or user of such products doesn't count.
Also calleddomain expertisefounder-market fit
How Founder Domain Expertise works
Knowing the work tells founders which problems cost customers the most and which product details will matter in daily use. athenahealth's founders bought birthing practices in 1997, could not get paid, and built their own billing system; by late 1998 the company had made billing its business. ServiceTitan's founders grew up around their parents' contracting paperwork and spent three years building at Mr. Rooter, a plumbing company, before launching in 2013.
Buy birthing practicesFounders run clinics themselves, 1997
Hit the billing wallThe practices could not get paid
Build their own billingAn in-house system for their practices
Make billing the productThe company shifts to it, late 1998
How companies won with Founder Domain Expertise
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. New Relic
Datadog
Infrastructure first: where outage diagnosis starts
- What it did
- Founders who had run dev and ops chose infrastructure monitoring for ephemeral cloud hosts (2010)
- New Relic
- Began with Rails APM (2008), deployed on application servers only
vs. Jobber
ServiceTitan
Built inside plumbing businesses, for plumbing businesses
- What it did
- Three years building at Mr. Rooter before the 2013 launch
- Jobber
- Built with an Edmonton painter (2010-11); one plain quote-to-invoice workflow for small crews across dozens of trades
vs. Akamai · 2004–10
Cloudflare
Cloud firewall switched on by a DNS change
- What it did
- Prince and Holloway ran Project Honey Pot (from 2004; 100,000+ members) on donated DNS records
- Akamai
- Enterprises bought hardware and contracted with a CDN
Also tagged: Adobe · Affirm · Amwell · Atlassian · Bentley Systems · Block · Bloomberg · Brex · Canva · CareBridge · Confluent · CrowdStrike · Dayforce · Fab · Fortinet · InVision · Klaviyo · Linode · Modernizing Medicine · MongoDB · New Relic · Nubank · One Medical · Palo Alto Networks · Procore Technologies · Robinhood · Salesforce · Snowflake · Sprinklr · Synopsys · Twilio · Veeva · Weave Communications · Workday · Zscaler
Founder Domain Expertise vs. Customer Discovery and Scratching your own itch
| What it is | How to tell it apart | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder Domain Expertise | Insider knowledge of the customer's work, gained before founding and used in early choices | The founder did the work, sold to those customers, or supplied them | athenahealth's founders running birthing practices |
| Customer Discovery | Learning about customers through interviews and experiments after the venture starts | The knowledge came from customer contact after founding | Toast building features on site for early restaurants |
| Scratching your own itch | Starting a company to fix a problem the founder had as a buyer or user | A buyer's or user's frustration never counts as domain expertise here | Tobi Lütke's snowboard shop leading to Shopify |
How to tell if a company has it
- Insider experience of the customer's workDid the work, built or sold to those customers, ran a supplier business, or grew up in a family business there.
- Gained as an insider, never a buyerExperience only as a patient, shopper or user of the product category fails, including owners whose insight came from buying tools.
- Knowledge of how the work gets doneWhat that experience taught about the customer's actual work, such as where billing fails or how jobs get booked.
- An early decision built on itA specific first product or market choice that used the knowledge, with a concrete connection between them.
- The experience came firstDated evidence that the experience preceded the choice. Insight learned from customers after founding is Customer Discovery.
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Paul Graham + | Related: expertise and organic startup ideas; Founder Domain Expertise is Strategy Canon’s editorial label |