I built a company that ended up getting big (more than 600 people).
And that's not always easy to manage. Especially because you constantly need to reaffirm what you are, and what you're not.
We often talk about enshittification, and it happens a lot with software that grows too much.
They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case.
This can create incredibly powerful tools, but also incredibly complex ones, and sometimes that complexity gets dumped straight onto the user.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's inevitable. There are good products that have managed to grow well. But people don't realize the difficulty behind that growth:
- knowing how to say no
- knowing how to hide complexity. Because complexity doesn't mean complicated
- knowing when to cut things
Building a product is making choices.
And all of this also applies to how you talk about your product.
In the beginning, it's authentic by definition, because it's the creators talking directly. Sometimes it's clumsy, but it's direct, it's opinionated.
The creator says where they want to go, what they are, and what they're not.
Then over time, teams take over communications. You need to appeal to more people, attract new user segments, have a smoother message.
There's a real risk at that point: trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
I was having this conversation earlier with Thomas about writizzy's homepage.
It's deliberately very clean, very simple. Just a manifesto. That's it.
It's rare to do that for a company with several million dollars in annual revenue.
Because you need to convert, right?!
I think in the beginning, you should focus on saying who you are.
With my previous company, we had a manifesto for the first year.
That manifesto laid out who we were and what we wanted to do.
You're free to work freely
People coming to the site didn't need to scroll for 5 minutes through dozens of beautifully designed blocks. The truth is, for a product you don't know, nobody does that.
A new visitor needs to decide whether to continue in less than 10 seconds. There needs to be a strong statement somewhere that hooks them.
And for us, that statement is who we are. And who we're not.
A blogging platform that doesn't waste your time.
This phrase isn't positive. Someone pointed that out to us. Why not just say "A blogging platform that saves your time"?
True. It's more consensual. But we just showed up. We're inevitably going to be compared to others. That's natural.
What the hell are we doing here?
We're frustrated, and we're building this product in opposition to something.
We want to create a simple product.
But not simplistic.
And beyond that, we want to give people back the ability to write easily, without being forced to show off on their professional network or create fake engagement on some bot-filled social media platform.
Maybe tomorrow our homepage will be full of colorful blocks with flashy marketing slogans.
Or not.