I'm glad it wasn't just me. I'm interested in both sides of this, the product development side and the dev tools side. But with all that somewhat confusing prose, I ended up in the neighborhood of: "I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened."
Was the heart of this that they assumed that radically faster builds was the killer feature, but they hadn't actually validated that assumption before building it? Or was it more they hadn't really segmented their users, so they hadn't realized that the high-dollar customers had different needs? Or that they just gave away the thing that was the real-problem solver for paying customers?
And given that the somewhat chaotic article was written by the CEO, I have to wonder to what extent the chaos was just a lack of editing versus there being a lot of actual chaos in the company throughout the process. Long ago Steve Blank wrote an article called "Founders and dysfunctional families" [1] where he talked about how a lot of founders are really good at managing chaos because they grew up in it, something that certainly describes me. He added that something that can make the difference between success and failure is the extent to which founders can also handle non-chaos. Because the ones who can't tend to "throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies" to get things back to the level of chaos that they're good at. That observation has given me pause for thought many times in the years since.
Was the heart of this that they assumed that radically faster builds was the killer feature, but they hadn't actually validated that assumption before building it? Or was it more they hadn't really segmented their users, so they hadn't realized that the high-dollar customers had different needs? Or that they just gave away the thing that was the real-problem solver for paying customers?
And given that the somewhat chaotic article was written by the CEO, I have to wonder to what extent the chaos was just a lack of editing versus there being a lot of actual chaos in the company throughout the process. Long ago Steve Blank wrote an article called "Founders and dysfunctional families" [1] where he talked about how a lot of founders are really good at managing chaos because they grew up in it, something that certainly describes me. He added that something that can make the difference between success and failure is the extent to which founders can also handle non-chaos. Because the ones who can't tend to "throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies" to get things back to the level of chaos that they're good at. That observation has given me pause for thought many times in the years since.
[1] https://steveblank.com/2009/05/18/founders-and-dysfunctional...