I would love for more companies to get profitable and remain small-ish.
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
he said, typing from Firefox with its new "open AI chatbot" sidebar button
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.
Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good.
But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid.
He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right").
I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults.
Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it.
From their website:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).