Share the end-goal for your product
If everything goes to plan, what is the ideal outcome for your product?
Become a sustainable company-of-one?
Grow, hire and take over an industry?
Exit through IPO or acquisition?
Dream a little!
If everything goes to plan, what is the ideal outcome for your product?
Become a sustainable company-of-one?
Grow, hire and take over an industry?
Exit through IPO or acquisition?
Dream a little!
My husband jokes about how we use to want to be free from the tyranny of employment. Now we want to be free from the tryanny of being an employer. We still (co) own Ministry of Testing, it's like being a parent, it's hard to completely let go of all the things.
I don't really have plans for anything/grand/new, I'm enjoying the freedom of working on side projects and doing IH stuff, but I definitely aim for the overall 'company-of-one' approach now.
That bit about not wanting to be an employer is super interesting and not something I'd considered before! I don't think I would want to be one either now lol. I'd bet a lot of aspiring IHers dream of their product growing into a full-on company without considering whether they'd actually enjoy being "an employer".
If I think big, I hope I manage to disrupt the analytics business and also go against the trend of SaaS.
If everything goes well, in a few years, medium sized companies will not use any 3rd party analytics nor pay any monthly fee for it. I think this is theoretically achievable due to the increased privacy (gdpr) regulations and also companies valuing their own data more.
I've always thought that user analytics and tracking user behavior is over-hyped. Not totally devoid of value, just that many of the insights gained from the data is stretched/exaggerated (and, in some cases, probably fraudulent).
Depends on what user analytics you track and where you set the boundry on "user analytics" compared to general data analytics.
You want to know if your app is crashing.
You want to know for which users it's crashing.
You want to know why it's crashing.
You can replace crashing above with many verbs: not converting, loading too slow, etc.
What about A/B testing? Is that still user analytics?
I personally don't think analytics is over-hyped, I think way to many small business make random changes based on intuition and not on data.
What I do think is true is that it's usually very hard to make sense of the data. You might know that
user X left the page after 10 seconds of waiting for the page to load, but you can never be sure that it was because of the load time. Maybe his power went out, maybe he accidentally clicked on your link in the first place.I mean user behavior, which includes A/B testing. And I specifically mean the insights we try to gain from it; like the example you gave in your last paragraph.
Crash reports, performance logging, and all that jazz is totally different and I don't see how it could be viewed by anyone as useless info.
This is great! Fully support that mission!
I'm not sure if it is possible with my product, but the idea of monetizing federated software is appealing to me. So it's bit in the spirit of company-of-one, but you release your software as open-source so you get a community going to move the software forward, and anyone can startup their own operation to monetize their efforts.
That sounds cool.. I'm not super familiar with the "business" side of open source software. How could you monetize it?
There are a few ways to monetize open source work, but generally you are offering commercial services or products that use the work. This generally also means that others can do the same on top of your work, which is advantageous because you can avoid things like vendor lock-in.
As an example, many Linux companies provide support and consulting services on top of working on improving the operating system. However, anyone with the technical chops can also provide the same support and consulting work. Similarly anyone can also sell hosted offerings of source products like SugarCRM.