The Unbundling Economy: Is Your Brand a "Bundle" That Customers Are About to Break Up?

For 20 years, we were told to make "All-in-One." The signal is that customers have learned how to make their own perfect stack.

Think about the things you use to do your job.

Ten years ago, your answer was probably easy: "We use Microsoft Office." It had everything you needed: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and email. It was all in one neat package, and it worked... fine.

Now, think about this day. Your answer probably sounds more like, "We use Notion for knowledge, Slack for communication, Figma for design, Google Docs for collaboration, and Zoom for meetings."

We "unbundled" the Microsoft suite, which is what happened. We took the best tools from different categories and put them together to make a new stack that is more powerful and flexible.

This isn't a mistake. This is what will happen.

"More Features = More Value"

In strategy meetings, the "noise" is what everyone thinks. "We need to add more modules!" "Let's make a platform that does everything!" "The more features we have, the more the customer will feel like they have to stay."

This plan is based on the idea that the customer values convenience above all else and will pick one "okay" solution over five "excellent" ones.

That was probably true back then. It was a technical nightmare to connect different tools. But that idea is no longer true.

The "Curator Consumer" is on the Rise

The "weak signal" is that technology (like APIs and platforms like Zapier) has made it easy and cheap to connect tools. The customer is no longer stuck.

The customer of today is a "Curator" expert.

They don't want the average CRM you made as an extra for your email system. They want to connect your email system to Salesforce, which is the best CRM.

They don't want the clunky project management tool you added to your accounting software; they want to link your accounting software to Monday.com.

If your brand is a "bundle" of different services, this means you're in danger. Customers are looking at each part of your bundle and asking themselves, "Is there someone who does this one piece better?"

If the answer is yes, they will take you apart and put in a competitor in place of your weak part.

How to Live in a World Without Bundles

In a world like this, the plan has to change:

1. From "All-in-One" to "Best-in-Class": You can't be "okay" at everything anymore. You need to be the best at one thing in the world. The goal is to be the one thing the customer never wants to get rid of. Slack is a great example; it does one thing so well that everyone builds around it.
2. From a "Closed System" to an "Open Platform": The Curator Consumer won't find your product useful if it can't "talk" to other tools through APIs. It's easier to completely replace your product if it's more closed.
3. The "Hub" Battle: In every "stack" the customer makes, there is one tool that is the "central hub," like Slack, Notion, or Salesforce, and everything else connects to it. The goal is not to be all the tools, but to be the main tool.

It's not cool to be a "Jack of all trades" anymore. It's time to be a "Master of One."

My question for you is:

If your customers could take apart your product or service, which part would they keep and which part would they throw away and replace with a competitor?