Your competitor just announced 10,000 new customers. You added 200 developers to your API program. Who wins?

Traditional B2B thinking says the customer count matters most. Ecosystem thinking says dependency beats scale every time.

The moat has moved

For decades, B2B competitive advantage meant user acquisition. More customers, more revenue, stronger position. Simple math.

That math doesn’t work anymore. The $420B business SaaS market is reorganizing around a different principle: the companies that provide infrastructure capture more value than the companies that chase end users.

Stripe doesn’t compete for the most direct customers. It becomes the payment rails that thousands of products build on. Twilio doesn’t fight for the largest user base. It provides the communication layer that other companies depend on. AWS doesn’t win by having the most developers—it wins because entire businesses can’t function without it.

The shift is from counting users to measuring dependency.

Why dependency compounds differently

User acquisition scales linearly. More sales capacity, more ads, more reps. Growth requires continuous input.

Ecosystem dependency scales exponentially. Every product built on your infrastructure creates switching costs. Every integration increases lock-in. Every developer trained on your API expands your moat. These aren’t distribution channels—they’re foundational infrastructure that others can’t easily replace.

When a consultant builds their workflow around your SDK, they bring every client with them. When an agency standardizes on your API, they create dependency across their entire book of business. When a developer ecosystem emerges, your growth becomes their growth.

The ecosystem GDP metric

Traditional metrics measure your direct impact: MRR, user count, and retention. Ecosystem metrics measure what others build on top of you.

The most revealing number isn’t on your P&L—it’s ecosystem GDP: the revenue, products, and workflows created on your platform. Salesforce’s AppExchange and AWS’s partner ecosystems demonstrate this at massive scale. The value created on top of the platform dwarfs the platform’s direct revenue.

When ecosystem GDP grows faster than your direct revenue, you’ve built real infrastructure. When it stagnates, you’ve built a product that others use but don’t depend on.

What this means in practice

The investment priorities shift. Documentation becomes infrastructure that scales adoption, not just marketing collateral. Developer evangelism turns into moat construction. Open APIs become the foundation of exponential growth, not nice-to-have features.

The companies making this work:

Open APIs early, tier access strategically. Free tier seeds the ecosystem. Paid tiers capture value as dependency grows.

Target developers, consultants, and agencies with evangelist programs. These multipliers bring entire networks with them.

Treat documentation as a growth engine. Clarity compounds adoption. Better docs return exponentially through ecosystem expansion.

Make it profitable for others to build on you. Affiliate revenue, marketplace access, or data sharing—whatever incentivizes ecosystem creation.

The uncomfortable truth

Building for ecosystem dependency means sharing control. Your roadmap gets influenced by what developers build. Your pricing faces pressure from what the ecosystem needs. Your product decisions have to serve builders, not just end users.

Most B2B companies resist this. They want to own the customer relationship, control the experience, and capture all the value. That worked when distribution was scarce and switching costs were high. It doesn’t work when infrastructure becomes the moat.

The companies winning the next decade understand: you don’t need to own everything. You need to become the layer that everything else depends on.

Your competitor is still counting customers. The smarter bet is counting dependency.