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But every business is always looking to maximize, but why is there a sort of contraction, and why now? There used to be a period of “Patrick McKenzie way of doing business” during 2005-2020 (https://www.kalzumeus.com/): - Be nice with customers, - Reimburse when they haven’t used the software, - Provide value, even with 3 fields on a webform, - And you’ll get positive feedback loop into higher revenue, even with a crappy layout, It was the time of Basecamp and Joel on Software. It was the time of Atlassian. It was the time of entrepreneurs being cool kids. What happened is the Schumpeter cycle (40-70 years, as opposed to Kondratiev cycles, 5-7 years due to stock movements). Internet entered a more stable phase, instead of the startup phase. The cake is now limited, everyone has reached peak time spent on phones, the eyeballs you get are eyeballs someone else doesn’t. The goal is to stay big. Now, to be heard, you need a designer, not only for your services, not even for your software, but even to publish your CVE (Heartbleed). If it’s not sexy it’s not worthy. Unless, of course, unless all of these Twitters and AirBnbs were fluff that can go away without any part of the economy depending on it, in which case we’ll just see another short cycle until we invent the final technologies/services which will stay. |
Revenue alone just isn't enough. You have to turn a profit