Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
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Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?
I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.
Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.