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Fetchnotes shuts down
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Posted by Ken
Feb 8, 2016 at 03:40 PM
Andy Brice wrote:
>Indeed. However sustainable long-term businesses don’t need VCs and
>aren’t sexy enough for the media to care about. So all we hear about is
>VC-fuelled Google-or-bust businesses. Consequently a lot of founders now
>think that VC funding is the only option. And when you are VC funded,
>your real customers are your investors - the people using your product
>are just a means to an end.
Very well stated.
—Ken
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 8, 2016 at 09:40 PM
>I do appreciate technological improvements, but much of what I have been
>seeing in the latest iterations from the hot service providers has been
>focused more on style and less on substance. I am still not sure how a
>new logo or using tropical colors rather than a more traditional color
>scheme will improve my productivity. And, I do wonder what the folks
>who designed the early GUI interfaces for companies like Apple and
>Microsoft think of all their hard work trying to standardize GUI’s from
>device to device and program to program must think of what is being
>offered up today.
Ha, yes. I’d have to agree on the style and substance. There’s been an explosion of truly impressive graphics apps in the recent past - some fantastic alternatives to the Adobe Empire are beginning to proliferate. But the number of truly ground-breaking text or knowledge management apps to appear has been remarkably small - there’s been no significant paradigm shift for a couple of decades now, despite some laudable (and now moribund) attempts. Some of the most interesting developments have been in the enterprise authoring space, but unfortunately those are about as accessible to the ordinary user - or even the ordinary business - as Mars. This is the area that really needs some serious “democratisation”.
Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 8, 2016 at 11:16 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>Some of the most interesting developments have
>been in the enterprise authoring space
Would you mind telling us which ones you have in mind?
>But the number of truly ground-breaking text or knowledge management
>apps to appear has been remarkably small - there’s been no significant
>paradigm shift for a couple of decades now, despite some laudable (and
>now moribund) attempts.
There is an inherent tension between niche products for “power users” and large scale innovations that might count as a paradigm shift. I’d consider MS Word such a paradigm shift, when it became the de facto writing application for the masses.
So probably the audience of this forum would lose interest in those tools exactly at the point when they turn their attention to the mass market, such as it happened with Evernote when it abandoned its power users.
Maybe what’s necessary is for small niche developers to learn how to survive as relatively small scale but profitable operations—and for users to adopt those developers and look after them. And if it’s subscription what it takes to look after them, then that’s what it has to be.
Then these “power users” can ensure that tools get developed that produce a local paradigm shift for their own working practices, not necessarily for the masses.
E.g. I have absolutely no problem paying my subscription to WorkFlowy or buying a lifetime licence for Gingko or giving a donation to WriteMonkey or paying for an upgrade to the latest version of ConnectedText; in fact it makes me feel good, almost like a charitable act, that my little contribution might hopefully contribute to their longevity. But it helps that I absolutely love those tools and they all produced what could be considered a “paradigm shift” in my little world.
Posted by Jan S.
Feb 9, 2016 at 06:21 AM
The pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski gives interesting talks on the whole start-up and sustainable business topic, they can be found on youtube, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eky5uKILXtM