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That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses

That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.

jonplackett 1y ago
I was trying to use Twilio the other day and just gave up because it’s so awful now. It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.
- sshine 1y ago
  I think Jira used to be okay, too. Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
  - christophilus 1y ago
    It always sucked. Or, at least , it did 15 years or so ago when I first (and last) used it.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Jira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought. If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good. But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        Yea, it's so customizable, that every complaint about "Jira" is usually actually a complaint about how the person's organization has deliberately set up Jira. Jira workflows can be configured to be amazing, or they can be configured to be the ninth circle of hell.
        sshine 1y ago
        The last time I used Jira, the CTO who decided he should be the project manager had made a ticket category named "Category". He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid. He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right"). I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults. Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
  - g0db1t 1y ago
    [dead]
- gannonburgett 1y ago
  Enshittification is the word we're looking for here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
tempaccount420 1y ago
Facebook and Twitter are social media, so having a massive userbase is do-or-die for them. I don't think the same applies to most businesses.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back… Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it. From their website: Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93. Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats. In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).

That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.

jonplackett 1y ago

I was trying to use Twilio the other day and just gave up because it’s so awful now. It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.

sshine 1y ago
I think Jira used to be okay, too. Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
- christophilus 1y ago
  It always sucked. Or, at least , it did 15 years or so ago when I first (and last) used it.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Jira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought. If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good. But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      Yea, it's so customizable, that every complaint about "Jira" is usually actually a complaint about how the person's organization has deliberately set up Jira. Jira workflows can be configured to be amazing, or they can be configured to be the ninth circle of hell.
      - sshine 1y ago
        The last time I used Jira, the CTO who decided he should be the project manager had made a ticket category named "Category". He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid. He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right"). I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults. Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
- g0db1t 1y ago
  [dead]
gannonburgett 1y ago
Enshittification is the word we're looking for here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

tempaccount420 1y ago

Facebook and Twitter are social media, so having a massive userbase is do-or-die for them. I don't think the same applies to most businesses.

jonplackett 1y ago
Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back… Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it. From their website: Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93. Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats. In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).