The vibe most people I know picked out from the recent Wired article on 37signals is that of arrogance. Personally I love their approach of not making too much revenue from any one client. It protects you from having to pander to a few rich clients which inevitably happens, especially when you enter the so-called ‘enterprise’ space.

What I think is insane, and what came across in that article, is to be a dick about it. Sure, you have a core set of clients and you take a strong stance in building your products for them. Clients on the fringe who demand features that don’t serve those core clients lose out. Having low license fees allows you to survive when they walk away.

Maybe it’s just spin but instead of saying “we don’t do that, you’re only paying us $150 a month, tough luck, we aren’t adding those features you need”, could you not speak to migration? No we aren’t planning to add those features as they don’t serve our core clients, it sounds like you’re ready to move onto another product such as product x, y or z. You then provide a migration path or tools to make it smooth for those clients to migrate off your product onto the one they choose.

If you did that, and clearly showed me this isn’t about lock-in, then I’d feel comfortable using your products. I won’t, however, put my data into a product who’s owners proudly claim that they ignore their clients.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.