Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Alien Skin Software | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Alien Skin Software

37signals.com

45 pointsspencerfry3 comments

Don’t undercharge. Once you are confident that your product is great, don’t be shy with your price. The smart people will pay for it. The whiners will leave. We had a product for a while that was much cheaper than our other products. Those customers required far more tech support than the professionals who use our other products. It was a relief when we discontinued it.

I cannot repeat this lesson enough, and this is the thirtieth time I have heard another company chime in with it. Charging a premium means your worst customers go afflict a competitor instead.

Beat me to it :p

One thing that really sticks out to me here is the emphasis on NOT growing too large. I think this is a management view that is going to grow increasingly common in the future.

Despite years of pounding in our heads that growth is the only avenue to success, people are finally realizing that great culture, lifestyle, and profitability are enough. Sure, some people will never have enough and will continue to grow for the sake of growing. But the idea that you can lead a 20 person company for many years and enjoy the profits is very tantalizing to a lot of us Gen Y-ers that watched parents work themselves to death.

It really looks like that's a preferable future than the one we currently suffer with: large, immovable conglomerates that lobby for an upper hand in the market, have an open disdain for employee culture (i.e., the "take all the fun out of making video games" quote from Activision CEO, who probably wouldn't be anything without absorbing the then small-company Blizzard for World of Warcraft), and will outsource core competencies for the quarterly concall to sound 10% better over same quarter last year.

I think the larger advantage is that, because of smaller nimbler companies, there is keener, more increased competition, leading to better products and more reasonable prices. Because of the lowered overhead inherent in smaller companies, more of them can be spread out. If you look at the wasteland that is the midwest right now, they could really use smaller companies dotting the landscape that work on all the sexy (hell, even unsexy or staid or sterile) industries that were heretofore dominated by gigantic conglomerates like Micrsoft, GE, Medtronic, EA and others.

The days of "get big fast" is over. It caused web 1.0 to crash and burn; but from that there is a more mature 2.0, which companies like Facebook, 37 Signals, github, twitter, Valve represent and who are starting to inspire others.

If small business truly represents the largest employer in the US, we have almost a national moral imperative to eschew building (and supporting!) large corporations and multinationals in favor of small ones, don't we?

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