So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
More from Patrick McKenzie
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
On a serious note, it's interesting to observe that you can build a decent business charging $20 - $50 per month for something that any good developer can set up. This is one of those micro-saas sweet spots between "easy for me to build" and "tedious for others to build"
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) September 5, 2019
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
More from Crypto
1/ Bitcoin: a bold new world.
Satoshi published the white paper on 10/31/2008. Right at the moment of peak despair during the 2008 financial crisis. Trust had been lost in a world that ran on trust.
2/ But why October 31st? It certainly wasn’t because Satoshi was a fan of halloween, it must have had a deeper meaning. With all of his actions, he demonstrated a careful precision.
He had been working on Bitcoin for at least a year and a half before publishing the white paper.
3/ “I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto
4/ On August 18, 2008 Satoshi registers registers https://t.co/rMWwiEwtxT through https://t.co/Uj8lMr10kB.
Satoshi was ready and waiting to hit the send button throughout 2008. What was so special about October 31st?
5/ I believe that Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on 10/31 as a hat tip to the ancient Gaelic festival of “Samhain” which was also the date in which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Both represent an end of the old and the beginning of the new.
Satoshi published the white paper on 10/31/2008. Right at the moment of peak despair during the 2008 financial crisis. Trust had been lost in a world that ran on trust.
2/ But why October 31st? It certainly wasn’t because Satoshi was a fan of halloween, it must have had a deeper meaning. With all of his actions, he demonstrated a careful precision.
He had been working on Bitcoin for at least a year and a half before publishing the white paper.
3/ “I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto
4/ On August 18, 2008 Satoshi registers registers https://t.co/rMWwiEwtxT through https://t.co/Uj8lMr10kB.
Satoshi was ready and waiting to hit the send button throughout 2008. What was so special about October 31st?
5/ I believe that Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on 10/31 as a hat tip to the ancient Gaelic festival of “Samhain” which was also the date in which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Both represent an end of the old and the beginning of the new.