With Amazon Location Services launching today, its a good time to talk about how small tech businesses can survive (and, dare I say it, even thrive) with big players in the space

Thread time!

First and most obvious: pick a niche.

The big co's are always going to be able to do it all, and do it pretty well. They probably can't do it all _really_ well.

And remember, niches are fractal. Amazon's launch looks pretty geared towards logistics/shipping with their geofencing features. But there are probably 1000 companies in the logistics geo space that will be just fine, because they do one thing well that Amazon will never do

Second: make the on-boarding, development, etc experience _great_

This is something that big companies are always notoriously bad at. They almost have to be. It's really really hard to write simple documentation for a service that does 1000 things

Amazon is good at many things, but they are already known to perhaps not be the best at the documentation/ease of use part https://twitter.com/drewdaraabrams/status/1339260528569450497

Third: build a friendly, personal brand.

Every company small enough where the CEO is answering support emails has a _huge_ advantage

They can make their customers happier, and know more about what their customers _really_ need than 1000 teams of market researchers

Even YCombinator, which is all about growing huge, says "better to make a few customers very happy than lots of customers a little happy"

Fourth: focus on something the tech giants can't offer

One that comes to mind here is privacy

No mater how good Google Maps is (and it's really good), it will never offer a service that doesn't involve tracking the every move of all your customers and their users