zlacker

>>waxpan+(OP)
Excellent, balanced post.

We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.”

The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet.

We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain.

The escape hatch is always subscription revenue.

It’s true you can build a unique business on unique values for a unique community.

But it’s a long slog in the MicroSaaS world where anyone can & many will straight up copy you - forever.

X.com is probably the only & last experiment on whether switching to subscription rev is achievable at scale. Looks pretty clear so far that it’s not.

This might seem a negative outlook, but it could be quite positive if founders know & accept it.

The secret is out now that, mostly, founders make the same amount of money in the same amount of time whether they go the VC or bootstrapped route (when it’s a winning business).

There will always be opportunities for finance-backed cartel-busting mega runs.

But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays.

>>sirspa+9s1
Why can't you take VC money and run the business the way you want? They can't force you to do anything. Sure they can pressure you, but if you have ownership and they have a minority stake, you can do what you want. Ello could have stopped at any time. Why did they raise 5 million only 6 months after their first round and another 5 million 6 months after that? What were they spending their money on? I don't see how this would have worked if they hadn't taken money

> X.com is probably the only & last experiment on whether switching to subscription rev is achievable at scale. Looks pretty clear so far that it’s not.

I don't know. X showed that you can fire ~80% of your employees and the product could still exist. Not only exist but push product at a faster pace. In the last year you got editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody identify themselves, longer videos, just to name a few off the top of my head. I noticed more large changes in the last year than the last 5. You don't need a lot of people to run a SaaS company and you can cut a lot of bullshit. And all tech companies are coming around to that conclusion.

Maybe if Ello had raised only a few million and kept around a dozen employees or so, it could have succeeded.