Really resonates with me, but it’s also not the whole story. The first company Steph cofounded was kickstarted. You have to have a vc/crowd/self funded runway just to be able to attempt to get the critical mass for 100% user supported software. It can take years to build the product and customer base. Everyone has to eat. Not everyone can do it nights and weekends while they have other income, or hit the career jackpot and save it all up front. Congrats to them though for living the dream!
100% User-Supported
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: 100% User-Supported
#32Really resonates with me, but it’s also not the whole story. The first company Steph cofounded was kickstarted. You have to have a vc/crowd/self funded runway just to be able to attempt to get the critical mass for 100% user supported software. It can take years to build the product and customer base. Everyone has to eat. Not everyone can do it nights and weekends while they have other income, or hit the career jackp…
I have explored just about every way to build and fund a company, including the VC route. The 100% user-supported path is by far the most fun (to me).
Re: 100% User-Supported
#33> Principled people have always been able to make principled software. The difference is that now you need far less money and far fewer employees to reach far more customers. 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.
Can confirm.
Re: 100% User-Supported
#34One issue with bootstrapped startups is that after five years, private equity buys the company and ruins it anyways.
Don’t sell out to MBAs, they exist to enshittify businesses.
Re: 100% User-Supported
#35[dead]
Re: 100% User-Supported
#36> If you have principles and enough patience
This is what I've been struggling with for the past few years but recently, have come to the conclusion that success WILL come, I just gotta be patient and keep making regular progress. Move slow and create things.
Re: 100% User-Supported
#37I 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.
You might like Joplin or Logseq, which are open source.
I hope one day the folks at Obsidian will make it FOSS. I don't think it will negatively affect them at all.
Re: 100% User-Supported
#38Really resonates with me, but it’s also not the whole story. The first company Steph cofounded was kickstarted. You have to have a vc/crowd/self funded runway just to be able to attempt to get the critical mass for 100% user supported software. It can take years to build the product and customer base. Everyone has to eat. Not everyone can do it nights and weekends while they have other income, or hit the career jackp…
I have explored just about every way to build and fund a company, including the VC route. The 100% user-supported path is by far the most fun (to me).
You and the Obsidian team been a huge inspiration to me. I love how the principles of File-over-app, user-funded, and private-first can align your incentives not just with the user, but with what feels soul nourishing to actually build.
It seems like there's an art to targeting a niche market segment that VC funded companies won't be able to compete in because the "gold vein" isn't large enough to support the hypergrowth and expected returns. OTOH if you plan to keep your team small then you can just set up shop and stay lean.
I've been building a product that integrates with Obsidian (hopefully ready to share soon), and it has been the highlight of my career to design and build software with these principles and to not be worried about balancing misaligned incentives.
Thanks for building a great product -- I'm super happy to subscribe and support y'all. <3
Re: 100% User-Supported
#39If Obsidian went VC or public it would be enshittified in 5 years or less.
There is no guarantee that they wont do any of that in two weeks and since it is closed source you are basically forced to accept the enshittification or have to switch to another product. This is the reason I haven't tried Obsidian yet. I will never use another closed source note taking app again.
I feel similarly, but this is specifically why I chose Obsidian, I've been a big Markdown/LaTeX user for years, and I jumped from vim to StackEdit to my own Nextcloud instance, and I've happily settled on Obsidian for the past 1.5 years.
In each instance, my notes were pure Markdown files backed by a simple file system. I was able to bring my hoard of Markdown notes with me.
As a bonus, I think there are a lot of technical Obsidian users who are ready to jump ship at the slightest whiff of shit. If Obsidian were ever bought out, I'd expect the Logseq contribution graph to go hockeystick shaped.
Re: 100% User-Supported
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no guarantee that they wont do any of that in two weeks and since it is closed source you are basically forced to accept the enshittification or have to switch to another product. This is the reason I haven't tried Obsidian yet. I will never use another closed source note taking app again.
It’s interesting to me that a competitive open source platform hasn’t really shown up. I know it’s all markdown, but given that it’s closed source. Open source people love to make competitive open platforms.
I am a huge proponent of open source software, but there's something to be said for building a sustainable lean business that can employ a handful of talented folks to work on continuously improving the product full time. It's hard to compete with that.