Core vs Context

Geoffrey Moore introduced a framework that's stuck with me: core versus context. The idea is simple:

• Core is whatever creates competitive differentiation: the reason customers pick you over alternatives.
• Context is everything else: necessary work that doesn't set you apart.

His advice: extract resources from context and pour them into core. Companies that put their best engineers on commodity problems lose to those who focus on what actually matters.

Domino's Pizza is often used as an example. Making pizza is context: theirs isn't notably better than competitors'. The 30-minute delivery guarantee is core: that's what built the business.

What this means for sports data apps

Applied to the sports data industry, the split is fairly obvious:

Context: Wearable integrations, data normalisation, storage pipelines, user management, authentication, authorization, etc. Every app needs these. None of them differentiate you.

Core: Your training methodology, the user experience, coaching logic, community features, the insights only you provide, etc.

There's no intellectual property in building another Garmin integration. It's solved. Everyone does it. Spending months on it means spending months not working on the thing that makes your app worth using.

The cost of building context

Building the commodity backend takes time (and it always takes longer than expected, it really does). But time-to-market is only part of the cost.

Delayed feedback loops. Six months writing data pipelines is six months not learning from users. Every iteration teaches you something. The later you ship and share, the later you learn.

Maintenance burden. Every integration you build yourself is code you own forever. When Garmin changes their API, that's your problem. Technical debt accumulates in context code just like anywhere else, except this debt is in code that doesn't differentiate you.

From an investor's perspective, the cost of context is about capital efficiency. Building infrastructure that can be bought is a poor use of runway.

The question

Now look at your roadmap. How much of your next quarter goes toward things that will actually differentiate you?

Building feels productive. But building things that don't differentiate you is just motion. The apps that win in this industry won't be the ones with the cleanest OAuth2 implementation or the fastest FIT file parser. They'll be the ones that shipped something different and learned from real users while others were still writing data pipelines.

This is why I built SweatStack. It handles the context so you can focus on the core. Get started here.