8 ms·

Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

140 points by johns 17y ago

wakeless 17y ago
Does anyone know who the competitor he is talking about is?
- dualogy 17y ago
  Could be Perforce or Atlassian Jira...
  - zackattack 17y ago
    I use JIRA at work and love it. Jus' saying.
- jordanb 17y ago
  Probably these guys: http://www.atlassian.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/
  - solutionyogi 17y ago
    I doubt if it's atlassian guys. My guess is that it's OnTime by Axosoft. May be Joel can clarify. http://www.axosoft.com/ontime http://www.axosoft.com/ontime
    - ghshephard 17y ago
      Atlassian goes head-head with FogCreek in terms of features and pricing. <$10K for 100+ Users. AxoSoft _starts_ at $43K for 100 Users.
- brown9-2 17y ago
  I'm dubious that it is Atlassian, since they have about half a dozen other (popular) products besides a bug tracker. At least I hope its not because I love using their products and I want Joel to do well too...
  - Carlfish 17y ago
    I work at Atlassian and I kind of assume it's us, partly because everyone else around the Internet seems to think he's talking about us, but mostly because the Fogbugz 7 manifesto talked in all caps about people threatening to "GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS". There's a good chance he isn't, though, because the company described in that article doesn't really bear a great resemblance to Atlassian. The business models of Fog Creek and Atlassian are far more alike than they are different. Both companies are developer-founded, private, non-VC funded and growing "within their means". Both aim for bottom-up adoption rather than selling top-down through CIOs, and (although this is apparently changing at FogCreek?) neither have a traditional sales team. Both even started off writing an issue tracker (JIRA, FogBugz) then followed up with a content management app (Confluence, CityDesk). Before this year we didn't have a growth strategy beyond "sell lots of software, and use the money we get from that to hire more people to make more software and sell that." We've recently got (temporarily) a little more aggressive about hiring because we figured the GFC was a great time for a profitable company to snaffle up any good people who were at loose ends, especially when some of our VC-funded competition were being forced by the same circumstances to lay developers off. So yeah, we're hiring. http://www.atlassian.com/32/ http://www.atlassian.com/32/ :)
    - noblethrasher 17y ago
      Fogbugz followed CityDesk.
      - Carlfish 17y ago
        I sit corrected. :)
    - ghshephard 17y ago
      GFC = "Great Fucking Crash?" :-)
      - j_b_f 17y ago
        Global Financial CrisOMGWTFauuuuughhh
- pseale 17y ago
  I'm going to guess TFS/VSTS from Microsoft, which is both a relatively new product, and fits his description of aggressive expansion.
edw519 17y ago
If increasing your growth rate is your objective, this looks like a very nice first step, Joel. You disguise a PR piece as an objective "how to" in a national business publication, coming across as an authority, the underdog, and an all around nice guy who really cares about his customers. You're an engineer who claims to be "weak" in the sales department, but all evidence to the contrary: nice "sales hack". Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool if he bought from your competitor. Not bad for a couple hours work. Kudos.
- spolsky 17y ago
  Jeez, everything is a conspiracy on Hacker News. How about I wrote it because I'm a columnist at Inc and I have to turn in one article a month? And how about, they hired me because they like columnists who are actively running businesses to write about the issues they face? (c.f. Norm Brodsky, the other columnist, who has some kind of a box storage business). None of the plumbers and dog shampoo-vendors who read Inc. do software project management. The number of leads I get from Inc readers is laughable. Also, you're confusing sales and marketing. They're different things. We're pretty good at marketing for a company our size. We're absolutely bad at sales.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    I don't think edw519's being sarcastic. I got the same vibe he did off that article, and I admired the article all the more for it.
    - vlb 17y ago
      He doesn't need to be sarcastic. It's just the same effect if he's sincere. Even if edw519 is sincerely complimenting Joel on 'disguising a PR piece as an objective "how to"', that's not going to be a welcome comment if Joel didn't feel he was writing a PR piece, let alone disguising it. A sincere compliment for doing something you wouldn't do intentionally doesn't make the recipient feel good.
  - edw519 17y ago
    Yikes, lighten up, Joel. I really meant what I said. I have no idea how many leads you get from inc, but I bet you get a few more with that piece. What I didn't say in my original post was that this was an excellent example of generating interest in your business while contributing to the community at large, and that quite a few of us here can learn from it. But now, I'm afraid to give you another compliment because you may misinterpret it. (Oops, too late.) There have been many times when my post was misunderstood because I accidently omitted the <sarcasm> tags. But this is the first time the inverse ever happened. Live and learn. </nosarcasm>
wallflower 17y ago
Atlassian Confluence (the corporate wiki product from Fog Creek's probable competitor) has pitiful search functionality, among other things, for all the revenue that product probably generates from site licensing. That being said, Atlassian Confluence's "Wiki" is updated nearly every minute (according to the homepage dashboard) at my company. It's not just a Wiki; it's a Wiki that normal business users can use. Fog Creek seems to think they can take on their competitor by mainly focusing on features while IMHO Atlassian's strength is producing an adequate product that works and more importantly makes the person at a company who leads and drives its adoption a likely corporate hero. Corporate sales is tough but lucrative. > "What set Oracle apart from Ingres," Moore writes, "was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres 'accepted' 50 percent growth." To achieve 100% growth: Oracle salespeople were fired if they did not achieve a doubling of their sales quota on a yearly basis.
- chrisbroadfoot 17y ago
  More specifically, the competing product he's referring to is probably Atlassian's JIRA (bug tracking software). I for one thought that Joel sounded a bit sour and jealous. Is it that Fog Creek is losing its "market leadership position"? (was Fog Creek ever a market leader?)
  - pchristensen 17y ago
    I wouldn't say jealous, more like disoriented to realize that his business hypothesis might be invalid. He designed his company to be a high quality competitor among many, but now he's got to face a category killer which requires very different tactics. A core part of his business has to change to something he doesn't necessarily want.
- jshen 17y ago
  It's a running joke at my company about how bad the search is in confluence. It's shockingly bad.
  - wallflower 17y ago
lawrence 17y ago
This is the best argument for considering venture capital that I've read in a while, and it barely mentions venture capital.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Not so fast. First, Spolsky probably doesn't need VC based on their revenue; they can staff up a sales team without going out for more money. Second, Spolsky got to spend ~10 years turning the dials to figure out what works for his product. He's in a good position. He has the option of increasing growth, and that option is more attractive right now than maintaining current growth. No VC funded company has a 10 year runway to figure out how to get their product right. Very few VC funded companies get 10 years, period: the investment needs to liquidate at some point. Finally, Fog Creek all but stumbled into their current product. They had a "VC-ready" product when they started (CityDesk). If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now.
  - SwellJoe 17y ago
    If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now. On what do you base this theory? I don't know that you're wrong...I just don't see how it naturally follows from anything we know about Fog Creek.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Allow for the fact that I am probably totally wrong about this. But, when I started reading JoS, Fog Creek was all about CityDesk. If they had gone for funding, they'd have done it to fund CityDesk. CityDesk didn't work out for them. That didn't matter, because there was no VC board to shutter the company or fire the management. And they hadn't run the VC-company playbook of hiring a 20-region direct sales force or running $1.5MM of ads to promote the product. So they weren't screwed. That's all I'm saying.
      - SwellJoe 17y ago
        Possibly valid. Venture-backed companies do sometimes evolve successfully, but I can see how your theory could have played out that way, though.
zaidf 17y ago
I am all for not being secret. But there are exceptions and in this case, if I am really mapping out a specific strategy to go after a competitor, I wouldn't blog/write about it. I'd be curious to hear where he draws the line in sharing strategic plans. The startup I am doing right now involves public data. I've been able to learn an incredible deal from my competitor just by googling around and finding the name of my competitor in the minutes of public meetings. On a separate note, this makes me feel really good about my decision to take Sales Management this semester:)
albertsun 17y ago
Joel's blog is an excellent marketing tool and I've read and enjoyed a lot of posts there and have a greet impression of Fog Creek Software. I know all about the working environment, what their philosophy in hiring is, how they treat their programmers, etc. And I've learned a ton about software development processes and working with others. One thing that I haven't figured out in all this time reading is, what products does Fog Creek actually make? I still really don't know what the products are, or what they do. In his last post he wrote, FogBugz, which is all about giving developers tools that gently guide them from good to great. It's a nice description, but it still doesn't really tell me what FogBugz does. Maybe Joel could blog about how he identified the problem for the product to solve, what specific features he's really proud of that make software development easier, etc.
- astine 17y ago
  From what I recal, it's a bug tracker.
- tedunangst 17y ago
  Go to www.fogcreek.com, it describes all the products. "FogBugz manages projects, tracks bugs, and even tells you when you’re going to ship..." It continues from there.
- philfreo 17y ago
  It's a bug tracker. Plenty of his articles describe it in more detail, if I recall.
- elviejo 17y ago
  Plus they make Copilot a tool to give Tech support based on VNC.
elviejo 17y ago
I'm I the only one that thinks this article is the stick part of the Hockey stick? In other posts (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html) Joel has said that: "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it." And then makes reference to the hockey stick graph of sales figures for a couple of products So ten years have passed for FogCreek and seems that now they are focusing on the stick. I would say this is the next logical step in that strategy.
- pchristensen 17y ago
  Joel knew you need developers to make the flat part, but it sounds like he's realizing you need salespeople to claim the steep part.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
> If you're growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. Assuming you both start out the same size.
MartinCron 17y ago
Even if you don't agree with what he has to say, his writing, especially for Inc. Is really good. I'm having a hard time seeing the comparison of FogBugz vs. Mystery competitor (consensus says Atlassian?) and Oracle vs. Ingress. Picking a db vendor has a lot more lock-in and switching costs than using a different bug database. Also, there are so many more competitors in this space, with plenty of good free options. Lastly, the barrier to entry is so much lower, I mean, I could write a usable software project management tool in a weekend, it's trivial. It would take at least a week to make a fully functional relational database system.
ghshephard 17y ago
Joel is definitely talking about Atlassian in this article. In particular, one of their products, jira, goes head-head with FogBugz. Joel has actually referred to them in previous articles, in terms of customers threatening to go to the "Australians" if he didn't implement such-such a feature. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html) Atlassian is really the Major Grower in this space - good sized developer community, and "App Store" equivalent (Plugin Exchange ) - They have about 50,000 plugins a month downloaded from a library of 400 - 130 of which are for Jira. The latest rev of their product, Jira 4.0, has one major feature - a SQL like query engine, they call it "JQL" - Jira Query Language - which allows you to do everything you might expect/imagine. Their searching was _already_ better than FogBugz, but JQL makes you not even not want to compare the two. Interesting Notes: Google for "Bug Tracking Software" doesn't bring up FogCreek, but does bring up Atlassian. Atlassian is like the "Anti-Fog Creek" in terms of it's thoughts around office. I've been to their San Francisco Offices (which are supposedly like their Sydney) - One Big Wide Open Space. No Cubicles. No Offices. Nothing - just pure Agile openness. Go to Atlassian.com - you are 4 Clicks away from having the software on your computer, and it takes about as many seconds. And it figures out whether you want OS X stuff, linux files, etc... Go to FogCreek.com - 30 seconds later I _still_ couldn't figure out where to click to try their stuff - and when I do, I finally land on a page where I need to start providing Email Addresses, Phone Numbers, accepting terms of services. It's almost like they are _daring_ you to try the competition. What's cool, is that _both_ Fog Creek and Atlassian are the ultimate results of Startups going head-head. Someone will have to write a book about these two companies. http://www.atlassian.com/about/history.jsp http://www.atlassian.com/about/history.jsp Atlassian: "In 2002, fresh out of university, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, With total start up costs of $10,000 charged to a Visa card, they built JIRA, a professional bug and issue tracker, and Atlassian was born. By 2004 the company had grown to six developers." http://fogcreek.com/About.html http://fogcreek.com/About.html Michael Pryor founded Fog Creek Software with Joel in September 2000. Fog Creek's Major Problem, and the reason why I suspect Atlassian is going to wipe them out if they don't get their Act Together, is that Fog Creek has, to my knowledge, three products: o Bug/Project Management/Software Project Tracker (fogbuz) o VNC Hosting Service for Tech Support (Copilot) o Forums for Software Developers/SysAdmins StackOverflow/ServerFault o 25 Employees Atlassian, on the other hand, has: o Issue Tracking Software (jira) o Wiki (confluence) o Source Code Reviewer (fisheye) o Code Review (crucible) o Continuous Integration (bamboo) o Code Coverage (clover) o Identity Management (Crowd) o 200 Employees o 15,000 Customers http://www.atlassian.com/about/customers.jsp I don't want to come off sounding like an Atlassian fan-boy, particularly as I love reading Joel's articles, and I don't think I've ever read anything, ever, out of Atlassian that caught my attention - but he has his work cut out for him. Of course, maybe Joel needs someone like Atlassian to shake him up and get him going...
ctrager 17y ago
Disclaimer: I'm the author of an open source bug tracker, BugTracker.NET, a sorta hobby project that got better over time and sorta, kinda, "competes" with FogBugz. Also, I receive money from Atlassian to display their ads on my website, but other than that, I know nothing about their business. So, I'm not any sort of insider. But I do pay attention to the space, and here's my two cents. Some of the income for these companies comes from the hosted versions of their apps. I think free and somewhat viral services like GitHub put a lot of pressure on Atlassian and FogCreek. 1) Downward pressure on what they can charge. Consider Atlassian's recent price drop. and 2) Classic Joel "Fire and Motion" pressure to match the competition's features. Kiln is FogCreek returning defensive fire. Not to mention less viral players but really nice playes in the hosted space like Unfuddle, Assembla. Christ, even Google. So, along with hosted apps, some of the income comes from installed software. There, both companies compete against open source, like Trac, Redmine, and even my own BugTracker.NET. Traditionally some stodgier companies have tended to be fearful about running open source alternatives, but there might be a generational change going on. There could be a tipping point where open source developer tools start being perceived even by the stodgier companies as being the more comfortable, safe, mainstream choice. Safer than commercial. That might already be happening with version control.
- ghshephard 17y ago
  Note: Atlassian just increased their prices. Our legal department was going to use their professional 3.x license to manage issues for 300 employees (You'd be amazed at how far people push Jira - a nominal software defect tracker is used by my company as a ticketing system, time tracker, project management system - we've got north of 20,000 issues entered and tracked through it) - The previous price was $2400 on a quote expiring on Oct 24th. The New quote (for 4.0 "Enterprise" - no more professional) is $8,000. Both Cheap, but the new prices certainly aren't a decrease. I doubt that many enterprise size companies (100+ employee companies) host their issues at either FogBuz or Atlassian. Security. I'm betting the vast (90%+?) of their revenue comes from license sales. BTW - Don't forget Bugzilla as a bug tracker - we were quite happy with it until we switched to Jira (ironic if you know where the name comes from). And you are right - Generational Change is happening. Right now. All of the people who where in their 20s and 30s In the late 90s, are now Managers, and Directors - and have some clue about open source, so it's coming into companies from the top, and bottom now.
BerislavLopac 17y ago
So the main point of this article is that the biggest risk a company can take is to not take any risks, right?
stcredzero 17y ago
I think the reasoning in this article also applies to programming languages. By that reasoning, it's by far better to have a crappy programming language that panders to mainstream expectations than to have something innovative that gives you a more powerful paradigm. I also think that sometimes the more powerful paradigm still trumps sheer numbers.
rfreytag 17y ago
Perhaps Joel has discovered why VCs are so dismissive of 'lifestyle' companies. If 37Signals starts to see market erosion then we'll know the VCs are correct and its grow fast or wither till irrelevance. Personally, I hope the VCs are wrong and that in fact what Joel has to do is undercut his competition in a way they cannot answer without destroying their business model. This is what Clayton Christenson talks about in "The Innovator's Dilemma."
geebee 17y ago
I'm a little sad to read this article. Are you always in a position where slow growth eventually means slow death? Or is it possible to find a niche where you can emphasize craftsmanship, quality, and a decent pace? The reason I ask is that a lot of software developers actually like the idea of working for a small, highly profitable firm that stays, well, small and highly profitable. If it is possible, what are some of the strategies you can employ to identify and/or hold on to this niche? BTW, when I say "small", I don't mean small in the sense of total profits or number of users. I mean "small" as in craigslist small - a company that can keep the headcount low, avoid employing lots of non-technical workers (like sales people), and hang onto what makes a "small" company such a great place to work.
- hello_moto 17y ago
  Not many owners have the mind of Craig. Most owners of small businesses I worked for didn't settle for a nice beach house, they want a yacht too! and they want it fast! like ... tomorrow. I blame humans for being greedy.
  - geebee 17y ago
    Eh, I wouldn't really "blame" someone for wanting those things (some would say greed is good, others (like me) would say that the honest pursuit of wealth isn't "greedy", but a lot of that just comes down to how we define the word). My question is for those people who actually prefer to stay small - how you can find a strategy and niche to make this possible. I suspect that a big part of it is how and where you sell. Vendors of for-pay developer tools need to convince a corporate procurement department to hand over the cash, whereas craigslist merely needs to convince people to post want ads, either for free or for very small payments. As a result, I suspect that the "sales people" approach wouldn't do much for them. Joel went with the micropayment thing for a while, but maybe his space isn't a really great one for a small niche-company? Hard to say, since developers are a pretty unique group of people who might work well as a niche market?
petenixey 17y ago
Awesome discussion. It's been what 10 years since people really started blogging and we started seeing the progress of companies live and as it happens? We've seen what happened to Google/YouTube etc. and how they moved into hypergrowth and uber-size but this is now the beginning of the next phase for the non-VC (bona-fide?) companies. Really interesting article Joel, thanks for sharing.

140 points by johns 17y ago

wakeless 17y ago

Does anyone know who the competitor he is talking about is?

dualogy 17y ago
Could be Perforce or Atlassian Jira...
- zackattack 17y ago
  I use JIRA at work and love it. Jus' saying.
jordanb 17y ago
Probably these guys: http://www.atlassian.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/
- solutionyogi 17y ago
  I doubt if it's atlassian guys. My guess is that it's OnTime by Axosoft. May be Joel can clarify. http://www.axosoft.com/ontime http://www.axosoft.com/ontime
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    Atlassian goes head-head with FogCreek in terms of features and pricing. <$10K for 100+ Users. AxoSoft _starts_ at $43K for 100 Users.
brown9-2 17y ago
I'm dubious that it is Atlassian, since they have about half a dozen other (popular) products besides a bug tracker. At least I hope its not because I love using their products and I want Joel to do well too...
- Carlfish 17y ago
  I work at Atlassian and I kind of assume it's us, partly because everyone else around the Internet seems to think he's talking about us, but mostly because the Fogbugz 7 manifesto talked in all caps about people threatening to "GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS". There's a good chance he isn't, though, because the company described in that article doesn't really bear a great resemblance to Atlassian. The business models of Fog Creek and Atlassian are far more alike than they are different. Both companies are developer-founded, private, non-VC funded and growing "within their means". Both aim for bottom-up adoption rather than selling top-down through CIOs, and (although this is apparently changing at FogCreek?) neither have a traditional sales team. Both even started off writing an issue tracker (JIRA, FogBugz) then followed up with a content management app (Confluence, CityDesk). Before this year we didn't have a growth strategy beyond "sell lots of software, and use the money we get from that to hire more people to make more software and sell that." We've recently got (temporarily) a little more aggressive about hiring because we figured the GFC was a great time for a profitable company to snaffle up any good people who were at loose ends, especially when some of our VC-funded competition were being forced by the same circumstances to lay developers off. So yeah, we're hiring. http://www.atlassian.com/32/ http://www.atlassian.com/32/ :)
  - noblethrasher 17y ago
    Fogbugz followed CityDesk.
    - Carlfish 17y ago
      I sit corrected. :)
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    GFC = "Great Fucking Crash?" :-)
    - j_b_f 17y ago
      Global Financial CrisOMGWTFauuuuughhh
pseale 17y ago
I'm going to guess TFS/VSTS from Microsoft, which is both a relatively new product, and fits his description of aggressive expansion.

edw519 17y ago

If increasing your growth rate is your objective, this looks like a very nice first step, Joel. You disguise a PR piece as an objective "how to" in a national business publication, coming across as an authority, the underdog, and an all around nice guy who really cares about his customers. You're an engineer who claims to be "weak" in the sales department, but all evidence to the contrary: nice "sales hack". Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool if he bought from your competitor. Not bad for a couple hours work. Kudos.

spolsky 17y ago
Jeez, everything is a conspiracy on Hacker News. How about I wrote it because I'm a columnist at Inc and I have to turn in one article a month? And how about, they hired me because they like columnists who are actively running businesses to write about the issues they face? (c.f. Norm Brodsky, the other columnist, who has some kind of a box storage business). None of the plumbers and dog shampoo-vendors who read Inc. do software project management. The number of leads I get from Inc readers is laughable. Also, you're confusing sales and marketing. They're different things. We're pretty good at marketing for a company our size. We're absolutely bad at sales.
- tptacek 17y ago
  I don't think edw519's being sarcastic. I got the same vibe he did off that article, and I admired the article all the more for it.
  - vlb 17y ago
    He doesn't need to be sarcastic. It's just the same effect if he's sincere. Even if edw519 is sincerely complimenting Joel on 'disguising a PR piece as an objective "how to"', that's not going to be a welcome comment if Joel didn't feel he was writing a PR piece, let alone disguising it. A sincere compliment for doing something you wouldn't do intentionally doesn't make the recipient feel good.
- edw519 17y ago
  Yikes, lighten up, Joel. I really meant what I said. I have no idea how many leads you get from inc, but I bet you get a few more with that piece. What I didn't say in my original post was that this was an excellent example of generating interest in your business while contributing to the community at large, and that quite a few of us here can learn from it. But now, I'm afraid to give you another compliment because you may misinterpret it. (Oops, too late.) There have been many times when my post was misunderstood because I accidently omitted the <sarcasm> tags. But this is the first time the inverse ever happened. Live and learn. </nosarcasm>

wallflower 17y ago

Atlassian Confluence (the corporate wiki product from Fog Creek's probable competitor) has pitiful search functionality, among other things, for all the revenue that product probably generates from site licensing. That being said, Atlassian Confluence's "Wiki" is updated nearly every minute (according to the homepage dashboard) at my company. It's not just a Wiki; it's a Wiki that normal business users can use. Fog Creek seems to think they can take on their competitor by mainly focusing on features while IMHO Atlassian's strength is producing an adequate product that works and more importantly makes the person at a company who leads and drives its adoption a likely corporate hero. Corporate sales is tough but lucrative. > "What set Oracle apart from Ingres," Moore writes, "was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres 'accepted' 50 percent growth." To achieve 100% growth: Oracle salespeople were fired if they did not achieve a doubling of their sales quota on a yearly basis.

chrisbroadfoot 17y ago
More specifically, the competing product he's referring to is probably Atlassian's JIRA (bug tracking software). I for one thought that Joel sounded a bit sour and jealous. Is it that Fog Creek is losing its "market leadership position"? (was Fog Creek ever a market leader?)
- pchristensen 17y ago
  I wouldn't say jealous, more like disoriented to realize that his business hypothesis might be invalid. He designed his company to be a high quality competitor among many, but now he's got to face a category killer which requires very different tactics. A core part of his business has to change to something he doesn't necessarily want.
jshen 17y ago
It's a running joke at my company about how bad the search is in confluence. It's shockingly bad.
- wallflower 17y ago

lawrence 17y ago

This is the best argument for considering venture capital that I've read in a while, and it barely mentions venture capital.

tptacek 17y ago
Not so fast. First, Spolsky probably doesn't need VC based on their revenue; they can staff up a sales team without going out for more money. Second, Spolsky got to spend ~10 years turning the dials to figure out what works for his product. He's in a good position. He has the option of increasing growth, and that option is more attractive right now than maintaining current growth. No VC funded company has a 10 year runway to figure out how to get their product right. Very few VC funded companies get 10 years, period: the investment needs to liquidate at some point. Finally, Fog Creek all but stumbled into their current product. They had a "VC-ready" product when they started (CityDesk). If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  If they had gotten funded, they'd be dead now. On what do you base this theory? I don't know that you're wrong...I just don't see how it naturally follows from anything we know about Fog Creek.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Allow for the fact that I am probably totally wrong about this. But, when I started reading JoS, Fog Creek was all about CityDesk. If they had gone for funding, they'd have done it to fund CityDesk. CityDesk didn't work out for them. That didn't matter, because there was no VC board to shutter the company or fire the management. And they hadn't run the VC-company playbook of hiring a 20-region direct sales force or running $1.5MM of ads to promote the product. So they weren't screwed. That's all I'm saying.
    - SwellJoe 17y ago
      Possibly valid. Venture-backed companies do sometimes evolve successfully, but I can see how your theory could have played out that way, though.

zaidf 17y ago

I am all for not being secret. But there are exceptions and in this case, if I am really mapping out a specific strategy to go after a competitor, I wouldn't blog/write about it. I'd be curious to hear where he draws the line in sharing strategic plans. The startup I am doing right now involves public data. I've been able to learn an incredible deal from my competitor just by googling around and finding the name of my competitor in the minutes of public meetings. On a separate note, this makes me feel really good about my decision to take Sales Management this semester:)

albertsun 17y ago

Joel's blog is an excellent marketing tool and I've read and enjoyed a lot of posts there and have a greet impression of Fog Creek Software. I know all about the working environment, what their philosophy in hiring is, how they treat their programmers, etc. And I've learned a ton about software development processes and working with others. One thing that I haven't figured out in all this time reading is, what products does Fog Creek actually make? I still really don't know what the products are, or what they do. In his last post he wrote, FogBugz, which is all about giving developers tools that gently guide them from good to great. It's a nice description, but it still doesn't really tell me what FogBugz does. Maybe Joel could blog about how he identified the problem for the product to solve, what specific features he's really proud of that make software development easier, etc.

astine 17y ago
From what I recal, it's a bug tracker.
tedunangst 17y ago
Go to www.fogcreek.com, it describes all the products. "FogBugz manages projects, tracks bugs, and even tells you when you’re going to ship..." It continues from there.
philfreo 17y ago
It's a bug tracker. Plenty of his articles describe it in more detail, if I recall.
elviejo 17y ago
Plus they make Copilot a tool to give Tech support based on VNC.

elviejo 17y ago

I'm I the only one that thinks this article is the stick part of the Hockey stick? In other posts (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html) Joel has said that: "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it." And then makes reference to the hockey stick graph of sales figures for a couple of products So ten years have passed for FogCreek and seems that now they are focusing on the stick. I would say this is the next logical step in that strategy.

pchristensen 17y ago
Joel knew you need developers to make the flat part, but it sounds like he's realizing you need salespeople to claim the steep part.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

> If you're growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. Assuming you both start out the same size.

MartinCron 17y ago

Even if you don't agree with what he has to say, his writing, especially for Inc. Is really good. I'm having a hard time seeing the comparison of FogBugz vs. Mystery competitor (consensus says Atlassian?) and Oracle vs. Ingress. Picking a db vendor has a lot more lock-in and switching costs than using a different bug database. Also, there are so many more competitors in this space, with plenty of good free options. Lastly, the barrier to entry is so much lower, I mean, I could write a usable software project management tool in a weekend, it's trivial. It would take at least a week to make a fully functional relational database system.

ghshephard 17y ago

Joel is definitely talking about Atlassian in this article. In particular, one of their products, jira, goes head-head with FogBugz. Joel has actually referred to them in previous articles, in terms of customers threatening to go to the "Australians" if he didn't implement such-such a feature. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html) Atlassian is really the Major Grower in this space - good sized developer community, and "App Store" equivalent (Plugin Exchange ) - They have about 50,000 plugins a month downloaded from a library of 400 - 130 of which are for Jira. The latest rev of their product, Jira 4.0, has one major feature - a SQL like query engine, they call it "JQL" - Jira Query Language - which allows you to do everything you might expect/imagine. Their searching was _already_ better than FogBugz, but JQL makes you not even not want to compare the two. Interesting Notes: Google for "Bug Tracking Software" doesn't bring up FogCreek, but does bring up Atlassian. Atlassian is like the "Anti-Fog Creek" in terms of it's thoughts around office. I've been to their San Francisco Offices (which are supposedly like their Sydney) - One Big Wide Open Space. No Cubicles. No Offices. Nothing - just pure Agile openness. Go to Atlassian.com - you are 4 Clicks away from having the software on your computer, and it takes about as many seconds. And it figures out whether you want OS X stuff, linux files, etc... Go to FogCreek.com - 30 seconds later I _still_ couldn't figure out where to click to try their stuff - and when I do, I finally land on a page where I need to start providing Email Addresses, Phone Numbers, accepting terms of services. It's almost like they are _daring_ you to try the competition. What's cool, is that _both_ Fog Creek and Atlassian are the ultimate results of Startups going head-head. Someone will have to write a book about these two companies. http://www.atlassian.com/about/history.jsp http://www.atlassian.com/about/history.jsp Atlassian: "In 2002, fresh out of university, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, With total start up costs of $10,000 charged to a Visa card, they built JIRA, a professional bug and issue tracker, and Atlassian was born. By 2004 the company had grown to six developers." http://fogcreek.com/About.html http://fogcreek.com/About.html Michael Pryor founded Fog Creek Software with Joel in September 2000. Fog Creek's Major Problem, and the reason why I suspect Atlassian is going to wipe them out if they don't get their Act Together, is that Fog Creek has, to my knowledge, three products: o Bug/Project Management/Software Project Tracker (fogbuz) o VNC Hosting Service for Tech Support (Copilot) o Forums for Software Developers/SysAdmins StackOverflow/ServerFault o 25 Employees Atlassian, on the other hand, has: o Issue Tracking Software (jira) o Wiki (confluence) o Source Code Reviewer (fisheye) o Code Review (crucible) o Continuous Integration (bamboo) o Code Coverage (clover) o Identity Management (Crowd) o 200 Employees o 15,000 Customers http://www.atlassian.com/about/customers.jsp I don't want to come off sounding like an Atlassian fan-boy, particularly as I love reading Joel's articles, and I don't think I've ever read anything, ever, out of Atlassian that caught my attention - but he has his work cut out for him. Of course, maybe Joel needs someone like Atlassian to shake him up and get him going...

ctrager 17y ago

Disclaimer: I'm the author of an open source bug tracker, BugTracker.NET, a sorta hobby project that got better over time and sorta, kinda, "competes" with FogBugz. Also, I receive money from Atlassian to display their ads on my website, but other than that, I know nothing about their business. So, I'm not any sort of insider. But I do pay attention to the space, and here's my two cents. Some of the income for these companies comes from the hosted versions of their apps. I think free and somewhat viral services like GitHub put a lot of pressure on Atlassian and FogCreek. 1) Downward pressure on what they can charge. Consider Atlassian's recent price drop. and 2) Classic Joel "Fire and Motion" pressure to match the competition's features. Kiln is FogCreek returning defensive fire. Not to mention less viral players but really nice playes in the hosted space like Unfuddle, Assembla. Christ, even Google. So, along with hosted apps, some of the income comes from installed software. There, both companies compete against open source, like Trac, Redmine, and even my own BugTracker.NET. Traditionally some stodgier companies have tended to be fearful about running open source alternatives, but there might be a generational change going on. There could be a tipping point where open source developer tools start being perceived even by the stodgier companies as being the more comfortable, safe, mainstream choice. Safer than commercial. That might already be happening with version control.

ghshephard 17y ago
Note: Atlassian just increased their prices. Our legal department was going to use their professional 3.x license to manage issues for 300 employees (You'd be amazed at how far people push Jira - a nominal software defect tracker is used by my company as a ticketing system, time tracker, project management system - we've got north of 20,000 issues entered and tracked through it) - The previous price was $2400 on a quote expiring on Oct 24th. The New quote (for 4.0 "Enterprise" - no more professional) is $8,000. Both Cheap, but the new prices certainly aren't a decrease. I doubt that many enterprise size companies (100+ employee companies) host their issues at either FogBuz or Atlassian. Security. I'm betting the vast (90%+?) of their revenue comes from license sales. BTW - Don't forget Bugzilla as a bug tracker - we were quite happy with it until we switched to Jira (ironic if you know where the name comes from). And you are right - Generational Change is happening. Right now. All of the people who where in their 20s and 30s In the late 90s, are now Managers, and Directors - and have some clue about open source, so it's coming into companies from the top, and bottom now.

BerislavLopac 17y ago

So the main point of this article is that the biggest risk a company can take is to not take any risks, right?

stcredzero 17y ago

I think the reasoning in this article also applies to programming languages. By that reasoning, it's by far better to have a crappy programming language that panders to mainstream expectations than to have something innovative that gives you a more powerful paradigm. I also think that sometimes the more powerful paradigm still trumps sheer numbers.

rfreytag 17y ago

Perhaps Joel has discovered why VCs are so dismissive of 'lifestyle' companies. If 37Signals starts to see market erosion then we'll know the VCs are correct and its grow fast or wither till irrelevance. Personally, I hope the VCs are wrong and that in fact what Joel has to do is undercut his competition in a way they cannot answer without destroying their business model. This is what Clayton Christenson talks about in "The Innovator's Dilemma."

geebee 17y ago

I'm a little sad to read this article. Are you always in a position where slow growth eventually means slow death? Or is it possible to find a niche where you can emphasize craftsmanship, quality, and a decent pace? The reason I ask is that a lot of software developers actually like the idea of working for a small, highly profitable firm that stays, well, small and highly profitable. If it is possible, what are some of the strategies you can employ to identify and/or hold on to this niche? BTW, when I say "small", I don't mean small in the sense of total profits or number of users. I mean "small" as in craigslist small - a company that can keep the headcount low, avoid employing lots of non-technical workers (like sales people), and hang onto what makes a "small" company such a great place to work.

hello_moto 17y ago
Not many owners have the mind of Craig. Most owners of small businesses I worked for didn't settle for a nice beach house, they want a yacht too! and they want it fast! like ... tomorrow. I blame humans for being greedy.
- geebee 17y ago
  Eh, I wouldn't really "blame" someone for wanting those things (some would say greed is good, others (like me) would say that the honest pursuit of wealth isn't "greedy", but a lot of that just comes down to how we define the word). My question is for those people who actually prefer to stay small - how you can find a strategy and niche to make this possible. I suspect that a big part of it is how and where you sell. Vendors of for-pay developer tools need to convince a corporate procurement department to hand over the cash, whereas craigslist merely needs to convince people to post want ads, either for free or for very small payments. As a result, I suspect that the "sales people" approach wouldn't do much for them. Joel went with the micropayment thing for a while, but maybe his space isn't a really great one for a small niche-company? Hard to say, since developers are a pretty unique group of people who might work well as a niche market?

petenixey 17y ago

Awesome discussion. It's been what 10 years since people really started blogging and we started seeing the progress of companies live and as it happens? We've seen what happened to Google/YouTube etc. and how they moved into hypergrowth and uber-size but this is now the beginning of the next phase for the non-VC (bona-fide?) companies. Really interesting article Joel, thanks for sharing.