Product-First, Rent The Rest
Own only your core offering; rent everything else from the best providers in the world.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Product-First, Rent The Rest is Zwillinger's rule for where to spend the company's energy. Allbirds is a product-first business; the core offering is amazing product people want. Anything that won't make the product better should be rented from an expert rather than rebuilt in-house — 'if it's not going to make our product better, let's see if we can rent it from an expert'. This is why they chose Shopify: they wanted a seamless shopping experience without hiring a huge engineering and tech-ops team to build and monitor it. By renting software from the best providers in the world, their own talented engineering team stays an order of magnitude smaller than it would otherwise need to be, and they can focus almost exclusively on the product.
Origin
Emerged from the founding realization that Allbirds is a product and marketing company, not a technology company. Rather than build e-commerce infrastructure, they picked Shopify in 2015 by evaluating their future road map and choosing the vendor whose core offering was exactly the burden they wanted lifted.
Core principles
- 01Define your core offering and pour your energy almost exclusively there.
- 02If something won't make your core product better, rent it from an expert.
- 03Rented software from the best providers beats anything you'd recreate.
- 04Don't build infrastructure a specialist has thousands of engineers on.
How to run it
- 1
Declare your core offering
State the one thing the company exists to be great at (for Allbirds, product) and commit to focusing almost exclusively there.
- 2
Apply the 'does it make the product better?' test
For each non-core capability, ask whether owning it improves the core product; if not, it's a rent candidate.
- 3
Rent from a road-map-aligned specialist
Choose a provider whose core offering is that exact capability, and evaluate them against your future requirements, not just today's.
Pro tip Engage the vendor to align road maps so the infrastructure scales with your ambitions.
Watch out Ignore narratives like 'that platform will never scale' unless your own data says so.
In the wild
Allbirds wanted a seamless global shopping experience without hiring a large engineering and tech-ops team, so they rented it from Shopify whose core offering was exactly that.
→ Scaled from nascent org to public company with an engineering team an order of magnitude smaller than building it would have required.
Common mistakes
Rebuilding what a specialist already perfected
Spending your scarce engineers recreating infrastructure a vendor has thousands of engineers on pulls focus off the core product and produces a worse result.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product-first founders who need to concentrate scarce resources on the offering itself.
Not ideal for
Companies whose actual core differentiator IS the infrastructure they'd otherwise rent.
From the transcript
“if it's not going to make our product better let's see if we can rent it from an expert and make sure that it's going…”
“the idea that Shopify has thousands of Engineers focused solely on this problem allows us to not even think about it”
From the episode
Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds Co-founder: How We Earned 7 Figures in Our First 30 Days With 0 Marketing Spend
Joey Zwillinger