• research origins
• rocket-ship ride after 1.0 launch
• golden age of the product and the podcast
• a mysterious crash from which we never fully recovered
• attempt at a B2B pivot
• team scale-down and product continuity
• new document type + emerging product category = hard mode
• partnership model and gradual team growth was a delight
• strong principles can come at the expense of building a business
• iOS/Mac native has some big advantages, but you still need to be on the web
@adamwiggins You didn’t go deep into pricing but tossing about an idea in a similar iPad-first-productivity-app vein (but entirely different market), anything worthwhile seems to need a team of five to do properly, but is hard to pull in the revenue that requires to sustain. Can’t seem to square that circle.
@ratkins Yes exactly. The success stories I've seen are usually solo entrepreneurs or duos, and maybe they support themselves with freelance gigs etc for the first few years of development. Only grow the team years later.
But hard to do anything more ambitious with that setup! Obsidian managed to do it, there are plenty of others as well. But pretty rare and there's no reliable playbook like there is for fully-funded startups.
@adamwiggins Right! Getting all the design, dev, product, marketing and business skill in 2 people is, well, impossible (even if they had the time to do all those things.) If you take VC, then you have to eat the world revenue-wise to make it worthwhile to them.
Is the problem App Store race-to-the-bottom pricing (and subsequent consumer unwillingness to pay), VC rapaciousness or the inherent complexity in building a quality app these days? Or all of the above?
@ratkins Not sure there's any single problem. When we started Muse in 2019, I said that people's willingness to pay for software (vs expecting ad-supported/venture-supported stuff for free) was a blocker. Since then I think most folks have grudgingly accepted that paying (especially with subscriptions) is necessary to have good software.
@ratkins One uncomfortable possibility might be the extremely high salaries of tech people. If the average software engineer earned the same as (say) the average civic engineer, the cost of developing software would be far lower.
@adamwiggins As a software engineer I am… concerned by this on multiple levels. It kind of implies our work only has this value when used for monopolistic rent seeking? 😐
@ratkins I hope not! But maybe another riff on the same idea: FAANG total comp is so high that it sets an unrealistic bar for anyone working on smaller-scale software. I don't know, but it's a puzzle for our industry that I'd like to understand better.
@adamwiggins In a general sense both dev salaries and investor returns are a Pareto distribution. There are a lot more people involved in the long tail, but we’re mostly hearing about (and aspiring to) the top quartile. Where in software are the staid and boring private equity investors who are happy with a 20% return?
@adamwiggins Still reading the article, but: the tension you describe between respecting your values, and making a viable business, is something I really dread with the app I'm currently building. I really don't want to compromise on my ethics and creative goals, but that might mean the app never becomes profitable—which would doom it in turn. Yikes!
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