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Comment by spacebanana7 | Hacker News Reader

Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.

If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.

But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.

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This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.

Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.

Tailwind was (is?) also selling "lifetime" licenses, which means eventually their sales would collapse anyway, once they have sold a license to most interested customers. They were always going to need to pivot at some point. regardless of traffic to their docs.

To play the devil's advocate, more people are born every day and as long as there are more developers today than there were yesterday, lifetime licenses can bring in a trickle of money each month, especially if the marginal cost of each new customer is zero or near zero.

True enough, though I think Tailwind suffered something of a black swan event of having lifetime pricing plus AI coding assistants hitting an inflection point that immediately and thoroughly decimated the value prop of their core monetized product.

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