[kelnos]

It's possible to do both. At Twilio we started as a self-service, developer-focused company. Today we have many large enterprise customers (and spend a lot of effort to court those kinds of customers), but we still have a huge number of small developers, and one-person hobby shops can and do still easily set themselves up to use our platform. We have added some enterprise-only features, which I sometimes have mixed feelings about, but everything that's traditionally been available to non-enterprises is still available to anyone with a credit card.

I completely agree with you on (at least in terms of Twilio's experience):

> would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn't pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?

We were definitely going to hit a ceiling if we didn't add enterprise features and work on getting all the various certifications that large companies will require to even start talking to you, and build a sales force that knew how to sell to larger companies. If we hadn't done all that, we'd be a much smaller company today, and likely a competitor would have done it instead and eaten our lunch.

[adventured]

> It's possible to do both.

I think the more interesting question is: can you always do both?

I agree in a general sense, as there are a lot of excellent examples in the wild at this point (of companies consciously maintaining their developer base), such as Cloudflare, Fastly, Stripe, DigitalOcean, Twilio, GitHub and so on.

It may be a case where it's much easier for some types of services than for others.

[kelnos]

It's probably true that you can't always do both, but I'm not seeing how it wouldn't be possible with something like Optimizely.