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I have heard of Obsidian before; is it some kind of documentation/notes thing? The stuff in the blog post sound great, so as long as the code is open and modifiable by users, I might take a look.
I find the “principled software” part a bit hard to believe, considering bootstrapped companies change owners too, but the editing files part is interesting. In tina cms [1] they have “visual editing”, which is the concept of editing stuff visually but pushing boring markdown/text files to github. Visual editing is an interesting way to avoid vendor lock-in but still provide a UI based way of doing things with text f…
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> acreom is VC backed, and doesn’t implement any of the mentioned practices ...yet. In typical VC fashion it will totally respect the user forever (wink, wink) until they want to actually cash out. PS: would've been a nice touch if you disclosed acreom is yours.
not unless these values are provided by technical decisions over policies or promises.
in acreom’s case, you own the software as well as your data and there’s not much we can do about it since we built it that way (local-first, offline with optional sync, e2ee, markdown without any acreom specific formatting)
It's got to be a short list.
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> acreom is VC backed, and doesn’t implement any of the mentioned practices ...yet. In typical VC fashion it will totally respect the user forever (wink, wink) until they want to actually cash out. PS: would've been a nice touch if you disclosed acreom is yours.
VC-backed companies eventually exit, yes, but bootstrapped companies often just… die.
And, plenty of VC-backed companies do not commit the cardinal sins described in this article; lock-in, anti-user practices, and so on. I ran a VC-backed cybersecurity company for nearly 10 years, and we never engaged in any bad-for-the-user chicanery, and our VCs never pushed us to.
This is an article to promote Obsidian (which is fine, and I have on my list to try) but on very shaky ground. Being bootstrapped, in and of itself, does not somehow imply Obsidian will be around longer or less crappy to their users.
It’s entirely about the founders and what they prioritize; not how they got their funding.
Absolutely. The idea that you need even tens of engineers to make a great product is ridiculous. Scope the product well and know what you’re building. Hire generalists and use boring tech. Profit.
I'd like to see some counterpoints. Which startups have been around for 15 years, took a bunch of VC money, but are as good to their users now as they've ever been? It's got to be a short list.
The ones I care about mostly don't even try to take my money in any reasonable way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> acreom is VC backed, and doesn’t implement any of the mentioned practices ...yet. In typical VC fashion it will totally respect the user forever (wink, wink) until they want to actually cash out. PS: would've been a nice touch if you disclosed acreom is yours.
Being bootstrapped doesn’t somehow absolve founders of that. It’s a false sense of security. VC-backed companies eventually exit, yes, but bootstrapped companies often just… die. And, plenty of VC-backed companies do not commit the cardinal sins described in this article; lock-in, anti-user practices, and so on. I ran a VC-backed cybersecurity company for nearly 10 years, and we never engaged in any bad-for-the-user…
It was super painful transition for Graphistry. Certainly as a founder responsible for payroll and having only so many hours in a day. Likewise, as business where people in serious gov, enterprise, etc teams are making mission bets on our team, it is both enabling & stress-relieving to know that we can prioritize listening to our customers more than what we think the next funding round's VCs need to hear. It's been night & day launching our new genAI analytics tool louie.ai: this time around, we've gotten to work entirely based on customer design partner feedback & revenue, vs next round VC funding pressure. Still major pressure given who our customers are etc, but of the positive kind.
We haven't taken further fundraising off the table. Importantly, this time around, if/when we do an A, it can now be very much on our terms, and in a way we feel won't unnecessarily jeapordize our customers & team.
As always, context matters. If a company is making $500K in month 3 because the founder is selling back to his old F500 buddies, or it's an n-th time serial founder who VCs line up to burn $100M on no questions asked, or it's yet another Cisco spin-out-and-in, sure. Likewise, we've been figuring out sustainable growth, and that changes a lot. But most pre/seed/A software startup situations nowadays aren't these.
If Obsidian went VC or public it would be enshittified in 5 years or less.