Facebook Was Perfect Once Too.
The pattern is so predictable it has a name: enshittification. If you build your business on other people's tools, one day they will stop working for you. This is the lesson I learned from Facebook, and it applies to everything you use today.
In 2009, Facebook was perfect. The premises were impeccable: share photos, thoughts, and articles with friends and contacts. See what your people shared. Interact. It was hard to imagine that something so well-designed to connect people could stop working for that purpose. By 2017 I no longer used it. And neither did many people I knew.
The collapse wasn't sudden. It was a gradual degradation — more advertising, more content from others, less of what originally made it valuable. Facebook wasn't an isolated case. The same cycle is underway in the tools you use today to run your institution or business: WhatsApp for communications, Google Forms to capture information, a third-party app for payments, a website nobody updates. They work today, but you don't know until when.
The repeating pattern
It has a name: enshittification. It describes the inevitable cycle of digital platforms. First they serve the user to grow. Then they serve advertisers to monetize. Then they serve themselves to maximize. And the user pays the cost of that progressive degradation. Worse experience, less reach, more restrictions.
This isn't an opinion or a prediction. It's a documented pattern that has already happened:
- Facebook reduced organic reach for pages from 16% to less than 2% between 2012 and 2018. Businesses that built their community there lost it without knowing.
- Google eliminated unlimited free storage in Google Photos and Drive in 2021.
- WhatsApp Business changed its bulk messaging policies in 2023. Companies that depended on groups for announcements lost that functionality.
- Mailchimp changed its freemium model in 2019. Thousands of organizations that relied on the free plan had to migrate or pay all at once.
- App Cometa is a startup. Startups close, pivot, or get acquired. If it disappears tomorrow, where is your students' enrollment data?
Size doesn't protect any platform from its own degradation cycle. Businesses that built their community on Facebook lost access to their own audience without warning.
Own estimate based on public Meta data and organic reach research 2012-2022.The invisible cost of the status quo
The problem isn't that the tools work badly today. The problem is what they cost silently while they work. Every piece of data that lives in Google Forms, in WhatsApp, or in an external app has to be manually copied for it to exist in your system. The prospect repeats their information on every channel you use. Their name, email, situation. The staff pays that cost in hours of work that don't generate value. The company pays it in scattered data that never becomes its own intelligence.
Every year spent building on external platforms is a year in which your company's history, contacts, and operational intelligence belong to someone else.
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You have more than three different channels to receive inquiries and none talk to each other
Consequence Every new contact repeats their information because there's no central system. The risk of losing data grows with each channel you add.What to do Make an inventory of all customer entry points and choose the one with the most traffic. That's the first to unify. -
When a new prospect arrives, someone on the team has to manually search if they've contacted before
Consequence You waste time and credibility. The prospect feels ignored and probably goes to a competitor who remembers them.What to do Today, create a shared central file (Google Sheets or Airtable) where the whole team records every new contact. -
The last article on your blog or news section is more than six months old
Consequence Search engines and customers perceive abandonment. Your digital authority erodes without anyone telling you.What to do Schedule a weekly 30-minute meeting to define content. Publish something, even if brief, before next month. -
If WhatsApp changes its policies tomorrow, you have no way to contact your community through another channel
Consequence All your communication with customers and prospects is at the mercy of a third-party decision. You could lose access overnight.What to do Start collecting emails or direct phone numbers from your key contacts. Build your own master database.
The real objection
There's something deeper than the technological risk. It's distrust in the provider. Someone disappointed them before. A website that wasn't delivered on time, a system that worked for three months and was abandoned, a provider who vanished with the server access. That scar is real. It makes the status quo of WhatsApp and Google Forms feel safer than any promise of a custom platform. It makes sense.
Q We already have tools that work. Why change something that isn't broken?
Q A custom platform sounds expensive, and the development process sounds long and risky.
Q We had a bad experience with a previous provider. How do we know this will be different?
The entry point
The solution isn't to replace everything now. It's to start building around to be ready when that moment comes (and it will). The first place to build something of your own isn't the most complex or expensive. It's the most urgent: an entry point where data is captured once and flows where it needs to go. Without duplication, without manually copying between systems, without the customer repeating their information three times on three different channels.
The most urgent examples
For educational institutions: Integrated online enrollment. The prospect completes the process once, the payment is recorded automatically, and the file is created without manual intervention. The WhatsApp + Google Forms + Excel + confirmation call flow becomes a single process that belongs to the institution.
For tourism companies and DMCs: A B2B portal for agents where the quote is generated in minutes without sales team intervention for the first phase. Every contact, every inquiry, every conversion is recorded in your own database. Not in the WhatsApp history of someone on the team.
For any company or institution: Your own customer and prospect database. It's the most urgent and the most ignored. Every contact that lives only on WhatsApp, in an external app, or in the email of someone on the team is a contact that doesn't belong to the company. It's the first digital asset worth building. And the one that generates visible return the fastest.
If you felt identified with what you read, let's talk. Tell me what you'd like to solve first and, together, we'll define where to start.
Next steps
If you felt identified with what you read, let's talk. Tell me what you'd like to solve first and, together, we'll define where to start.
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