Capitalism is weird. It keeps us all busy chasing financial rewards, which sometimes leads to outcomes that are positive for society, but it also creates artificial needs, markets, and dynamics around them, and it's some of those needs and dynamics that have always felt a bit unnatural to me.
To start somewhere, I remember the day someone in the mobile developer tooling market reached out and floated the idea of buying Tuist. What would they buy? Why would they buy it? A week later they came back with a "we don't think your project generation thing will go anywhere, but what if we give you 50$ a month to talk about our company a few times on X." No, I said, we are not influencers. But it turns out that's how some people with access to capital see open source and open source maintainers, as folks who can build strong brands and communities, and who might be persuaded to trade reputation for peanuts. Some companies in this position have wide latitude when it comes to chasing financial goals, and this one was willing to publicly surface other people's mistakes in exchange for eyeballs. They eventually ended up in an exit to a larger company that wanted a presence in the mobile market, the very presence they had manufactured by throwing money at the problem. That is what money lets you do. You can manufacture value and aim for an exit story. A bit sad to see, honestly.
I'm not against raising capital, but I don't relate to the idea of round-to-round jumping as the final game to play. I dislike it because the incentive of pushing valuation up tends to be stronger than bringing real value to the people that use your craft, and at some point the gap becomes so visible that companies have to invent a story to mask what's becoming obvious to everyone, the enshittification. I don't want to be in that position. The position of having promised multiples of a valuation, realizing you can't go beyond the current ceiling, and starting not only to throw darts at ideas but to invent fictional needs and stories that your customers can buy into. That's when you see companies organizing events that look more like a festival, or coining new categories like Mobile DevOps, where even the people pushing the term struggle to define it. I'm a firm believer that a business' natural growth needs time, the time you might not have if you raised money and promised to spend it in two years. Only when you have the freedom that perspective gives you, that is when you can make decisions that fit incrementally into the product. Rushing it is a recipe for disaster, and you don't want your users to gain perspective on how absurd the whole thing has gotten. I was reading yesterday about an app that had replaced its core with WebKit after endlessly shipping features, including a subscription-capped note-taking feature, and users were frustrated and going back to their previous app. That's the tension I'm describing. You lay the ground for enshittification.
Because money is sexy. Who doesn't want it? But you don't really get to tell your users about it, because no one likes seeing others get richer, unless we get richer with you, in which case we're vibing, and we can all figure out together how to make you richer. Perhaps it's not about the quality of your app, perhaps you just aren't using these other features I'm offering you. Let's all figure out how to get more people sharing their MRRs on the socials, because that's marketing for me too, so I want more indies building, I don't really care what. Sad to say, but it happens. I said capitalism is odd, and this is once again an example. The craft becomes secondary. It's all about the money. The more and the faster, the better.
And as I said, you don't want to tell your users about it, you need a story. One founder kept insisting that their main focus was delivering value to their users. That sentence kept replaying in my head, because that's what I had always assumed was the point of a company, but after seeing how many companies actually operate, it's not always the case, even when the marketing site says otherwise. As I said earlier, what we need is a good story. Capitalism needs good storytelling, one that can cover the interests living in the back end. Don't run away when I merge acquisitions and water down the product, I'm still here for you. Well, no. You are sold to your investors, you are building for them, and we are just a tool.
We did raise. Tuist wouldn't have got off the ground otherwise, but we were very clear from the start that jumping from round to round was not the game we wanted to play. We'd only raise if we saw the need, and right now we don't, so we keep walking our path from a point of profitability, without the weight of external incentives. It's liberating, especially as you watch other companies around you play a different game. We've already had three conversations around acquihiring us. They never use that word, of course; they prefer "joining forces", because without us you folks will have a hard time, and that might be fine because you might not want to eat the world like us.
The deeper you go, the more absurd it gets, but I guess it's inherent to doing business with money as the first goal. People will take any shortcut to multiply profits, and what I find funny now is that I can see the two realities clearly. There's the struggle of balancing what your business is actually capable of with what you promised the investors. And then there's the story you tell your users. The strange part is that, in the process, the company often digs the tomb of its own product, even though for the people running it that might still end in an exit. Look at Heroku. But for them, that doesn't really matter.
I think there's value in building a different kind of company. One that places people and craftsmanship first over growth at any cost. A company that is fine with not capturing 100% of the value, gifting the world with OSS tech that anyone has access to, like cities building public parks. A company that embraces the perspective of time to make incremental changes that genuinely make sense to the users.