One trait I’ve seen in “non-organic” software is the use of the Enterprise SaaS playbook.
Start bottoms up, give away free or low/no margin services, gain adoption, capture the market, then with the pressure to grow, they start moving upmarket, go after 100K+ deals and raise prices, and eventually price out / fire vast chunks of their early adopters.
Been personally bit by this a few times, so these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software, at least not without a backup plan.
I’ve also started to use the term customer-funded (similar to VC-funded), instead of “bootstrapped”, since the latter seems to give off an impression of early stage whereas the former is a conscious choice and state of being.
> these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software
I’ve noticed the same thing happening to myself and hope to avoid a future where consumers only feel like they can trust/adopt software developed by FAANG type companies)
Really great blog post and ‘Customer-funded’ is a really good term. I agree, much better than bootstrapped
UPDATE: read even more of your posts/product page… if/when I add full data search to kinopio, I’ll be looking at typesense first :)
This is clearly not the enterprise playbook. The enterprise playbook is to sell on slides, iterate with a few customers and go after even bigger customers.
Start small and trying to go upmarket is the normal playbook for a b2b smb company that is not growing anymore. Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry
> The enterprise playbook is to sell on slides, iterate with a few customers and go after even bigger customers.
I would call this product discovery and development with early adopters, something I hope every startup is doing. I've also seen this be called a Lighthouse program.
> Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry
I definitely get the appeal. To build a billion dollar revenue (not valuation) venture scale company, you can either get 1000 users paying you 1M dollars each, or 1M users paying you $1000 each [1].
It's just painful as a relative early customer to get priced out and no longer be the target market for a company, especially when it has set its eyes on exponential growth and starts to see the SMB market as a means to an end.
The other way to look at it, is that if the company starts to give up a product-first market to an enterprise market it is because they are loosing or struggling to keep their customers in their first market and so they dont have the best product.
So as a customer if you want the best product then you have to switch
That's... just how you run a sustainable business. As you grow, you simply can't support the small guys with their legacy shit and corner cases. Every service business does this. You have to.
I've actually heard the opposite. Once you have a few large enterprise customers who bring in disproportionate amount of your revenue, you end up having to service their bespoke needs and corner cases, at the risk of losing them as customers. So the product ends up inviting a lot of complexity.
Having worked at a startup that was beholden to a very large client in the space. I too can agree that this is more like what actually happens. The tail wags the dog.
I think “organic” is prob the wrong word. It’s already a rather tortured word, even in just the farming world where it’s legislated. My brother, a small organic farmer with about 5 acres really groaned recently when telling me that hydroponic veggies can be labeled organic. And when I see it on non-far products (like salt, which is a real example that will make any nerd’s hair stand on end), it just feels like intentionally misleading marketing, not an honest description.
Anyway, I have a real soft spot for the sort of software the author talks about. I think of shops who build software like this as “design build”. Like in the construction world where design build means a small shop focused on overall quality and fit of the home to its owner, not scale or economy, etc. maybe that is a phrase that works?
I was thinking about that while coming up with the term. IRL 'organic' food labelling has a lot of real problems, some bordering on scam. Despite that, shoppers in a grocery store have generally the same overall idea of what organic food is Supposed to be. That ideal/supposed state is what I wanted to build off from to have a term that speaks to regular people.
It's definitely not a perfect parallel in lots of ways. That said, I think this may be one of those times where the perfect (e.g. requiring the technically perfect word) may be the enemy of the good (of communicating important consumer information to people.)
To that end, I tried to keep the criteria of 'organic software' very short and free of exceptions.
I'm down for any label that sticks on this concept. I would love for this idea to be part of the larger conversation around building software and communities on line. Thanks for the reply and article!
That is because most citric acid is made in genetically modified black mold grown on GMO produced corn syrup. Sounds crazy, but it's true, and likely pretty safe. A similar process is used to produce most vitamin C supplements.
In today's software industry, people not only don't care about Quality; they are actively hostile towards it. It almost seems to be a race to the bottom.
If it isn't scaled into millions of users, billions of dollars, or gigantic numbers of GH stars, then it's not worth anything, and anyone that works in a way that treats software development as a craft, is treated in a rather shabby fashion.
I don't particularly care (anymore), but I probably would, if I were trying to make money. It used to make me rather upset, but these days, I'm more amused, than anything else.
> e.g.2. selling quality software on the iOS app store is like trying to sell a ferrari in a literal dollar store. It's going to be an uphill battle.
That's a problem. The iOS App Store was initially founded as a "dollar store," but has become more and more expensive, over the years. I think that most of the apps that I've paid for, are in the $10-$40 range. A couple are ongoing in-app "subscriptions."
The only non-free app that I sell, is a countdown timer. I ask $0.99 for it, in the vain hope that, one day, I might recoup the localization costs (about $1,300), but I don't especially care, whether or not I ever do. I certainly couldn't ask for more, with a straight face. I'll be releasing a total rewrite of it in a few days, when I get back the localization files.
Most of what I do is free, and I've yanked about 20 apps off the store, when they get "long in the tooth."
I usually treat anything that isn't open source, or a product that makes multiple billions of dollars and is totally entrenched in industry, as basically disposable.
I will use it, especially if it's free/youretheproductware, if it's convenient, but I don't want to build anything on top of it. I don't want to create anything with it that can't be ported elsewhere.
With open source it's a lot more comfortable to say "This appears to be popular and will be around for a long time, I don't need to start thinking about alternatives".
Occasionally in some areas it's helpful to keep alternatives in mind in case something better comes along, but some things are already near universal.
that's understandable, and also a harbinger of a future I'd like to help prevent. There's lots of great commercial software that's worth paying for and that isn't made by megacorps
just wanted to say the actual mind mapping tool the author is building has is a stylish and cozy piece of software. The wii shop music remix attached to the pricing card made me grin.
It's great. The movable boxes and links between them remind me a lot of the Self programming language which I love, and the way the boxes wiggle when you pick them up is just genius.
Can’t help but ask, do you really not have an API for Java? Just seems strange that much smaller languages have example codes, yet such a behemoth doesn’t.
Basically, I'm retired and focused on building up a few products. My first step is a deep-deep investment in a back-end superpower. I'm wandering with no real user-focused goals, and the key reason it is early access is that I want to get some feedback. I am slowly working on a few improvements and building a roadmap for some neat things that I want to try, but I'm enjoying life now (and recovering physically).
I'm tinkering with my next step which is a new reactive front-end template system which binds to my super back-end. I have a few theories about getting user value since I am basically do 3-5 start-ups in one.
Appreciate the write up, and I'll integrate some of the language in how I present my "organic" software.
I watch out for the scale. Has the organisation/corporation any similarity with mine/me?
So e.g. at a farmers market, I don't care about organic in the first place. I can look the vendor in the eye and build trust. If they say organic, nice. They better not spend too much of an effort on certification. That invites cheating. The trust has to be personal. And that is a harsh limit for scaling.
So if I am an individual or small entity, I prefer business with other small entities. If I am a big one, likewise. The latter we see all over the place. The former we should more, too, and rely far less on the megacorps.
I've chosen to develop my software as removed from the financial world as possible. I volunteer my time to work on it, and it receives only non-financial support for the most part. The only exception I've made is paying for web hosting, which is only a few hundred a year.
I did this a couple times before building and focusing on kinopio.club full time. In my own personal experience, volunteering only worked with side-projects. If you can do more through volunteering effort that’s very impressive.
yup that'd be one good option, I'm sure there are others as well.
I think fundamentally rethinking the default assumption of investment models from taking many risky bets on 20x-100x return, to taking less risky/more-informed bets on 2-4x returns may also be something to look at
The ‘organic’ term here is referring to funding, not design. That said ‘paving the cow paths’ can be a very effective way to build/design what people want.
Start bottoms up, give away free or low/no margin services, gain adoption, capture the market, then with the pressure to grow, they start moving upmarket, go after 100K+ deals and raise prices, and eventually price out / fire vast chunks of their early adopters.
Been personally bit by this a few times, so these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software, at least not without a backup plan.
I’m a founder myself and this is one big concern I have about raising VC funds. Wrote about this here recently: https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/
I’ve also started to use the term customer-funded (similar to VC-funded), instead of “bootstrapped”, since the latter seems to give off an impression of early stage whereas the former is a conscious choice and state of being.