If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out.
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
> I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots
People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?
I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.
Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
I am wondering about one thing though. I would also wish to do things bootstrapped if possible if I ever do anything but I just have some questions that might sound stupid but alright
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
You're assuming everyone values things the way you do. People do want to pay for products that solve their problems. Pick a problem you know well and solve it for someone else who has that problem. Discover if it has enough value to them to charge an appropriate fee. If that fee covers your cost then you are in business. Now figure out what it is going to take to find the next person. Find them, solve their problem. Widen the net to a larger group and you are moving. You have to start though, you need time researching, interviewing customers, messing around.
You sell it. And users are happy to pay because they're getting time and value in return. I also sell a product - not something database related but it doesn't matter. The users get value out of our product. To get the same thing elsewhere it would either cost them much more, be a lot less flexibly available, or be of lower quality.
If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.
Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".