I appreciate and relate to this comment. One of my favorite aspects of owning a small business is that I can realistically understand every part of the business that I’m responsible for, and I like that. I’m not wading into a conversation about hiring trustworthy employees here. I don’t want hyper-growth. I don’t want 1,000 employees. I like being incorporated in my actual state, and I don’t want external actors to have control of my business. I don’t want to go public.
There’s this sort of toxic assumption that every small business just isn’t a big business yet. I’ve seen it at work in relationships with vendors where a conversation goes something like:
Business: “Okay, the Business plan fits us nicely but we need one feature from the Enterprise Pro Plus Max plan. Could we negotiate a slight increase in the Business plan and get that one feature flag enabled for our account?”
Vendor: “We’d love to help! We’ll give you a discount on the Enterprise Pro Plus Max tier that makes it the cost of the Business tier for a three year commitment, so you don’t have to grow into it overnight.”
Which of course no one has to do for any (prospective) customer. But it’s exhausting to have to explain that you’re not trying to grow into a business that can spend $80,000/mo with every vendor just to get features you need. And it’s really frustrating when you’re servicing a customer in a regulated industry who wants to expand with you, but vendors think things like audit trails are only useful or appropriate (or “not confusing”) for capital-E-Enterprises.
In my business the result has been a reliance on self-hosted FOSS applications but that’s not practical for things like payment processing, at least for a small business. If I were large enough for it to make sense to do my own payment processing I wouldn’t need Stripe in the first place.