Random note: Has anyone noticed how fast the author's webpage is? I know it's static, but I mean it's fast even for the DNS lookup. I would love to know what they have on.
There is an nginx server running on debian stable somewhere in the dark heart of Germany. But I do have numerous tricks (too many, probably) to keep things quick.
But there are still ways to be quicker. For example, the header photo is smaller than the vector diagrams on the page, by about tenfold.
Just a reminder that a larger portion of today's market value is made up from Tech stocks. Tech stocks are typically higher valuations and P/E multiples, giving a skewed data point perspective vs. 20 years ago.
I see Cisco with a few years of 15% net income profit margin from 1998 to 2000 (they do not have any reports before that on their website). And Ericcson is in the single digit ranges around 7%. Cisco actually got more profitable and since at least 2006 has been in the 20% range.
Apple has been in 20%+ range for over a decade, Alphabet in the 25% range, Microsoft is hitting 30% regularly, and Facebook is at nearly 40% for the last 5 years.
For Amazon, I can only assume investors are factoring in huge profit margins for AWS since it seems to be singlehandedly marching Amazon’s profit margins from near 0% to 6% in the last 6 or 7 years.
Feels like a different level of profit than in previous decades.
So you are arguing that the market is overvalued -- because tech stocks are overvalued? Makes sense, perhaps the apparent overvalue is simply because of companies like Uber and Tesla.
At the end of the day, stocks are worth whatever people pay for them. It is a fact that tech stocks do have higher P/E multiples at this moment in time. The important question for investors is whether those multiples mean that the stocks are overvalued... or whether they deserve it. The market will decide that, and the answer may change drastically just like any other set of stocks.
I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why.
Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means.
If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment.
Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
1) There’s customers who will pay 15k for the exact same users/features as you’re willing to pay <3k for. If they offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn’t pay for the expensive package.
2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they’re often as expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc) but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a company decides where to focus it’s going to go where the money is.
I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs.
I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem.
One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.
> Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks.
And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate.
Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.
> Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.
Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year
I see the support excuse all the time, but I don't understand why it needs to be that way and I don't really believe it to be honest. Sell me a small business version that includes per-incident support. If someone has a problem and balks at the idea of paying fair value for the support they need, then I agree they're not worth having as a customer.
If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding. To me though, they're building poorer quality products that aren't going to capture enough up and coming businesses and the long term impact is going to be a bunch of bloated garbage with a ton of half baked features where everyone is competing for the "enterprise" dollars.
> It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation
To me, that's what it's really about. It's pump and dump quality SaaS that's built for an IPO, not for the users.
> If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding.
Yes, that is the goal. When an org decides to target primarily enterprise, the whole business model changes. You go from self serve to sales, from support chat to SLAs, etc.
You literally become unable to support small customers cost effectively and they are not worth your time.
Happens a lot in the B2B SaaS space when companies realize how much easier it is to have 10 users for $10,000 than 1000 users for $10. Some companies decide to keep focusing on small businesses and indies, which is great.
Ultimately there’s room for both business models in the world. But as a business, you have to make sure you work with businesses where you are [still] the target market.
Significantly damages your brand to do this and you'll defacto turn into a consulting company. Plus places incentives on your org to force things to be incidents since that's what pays. You'll get stuck in a local minimum of being a small-time consulting company.
Or maybe you won't. But that's the reason I wouldn't want to do it.
Besides, there's no way you can only access the no-support users. Google, for instance, offers one of these for their email product and are able to make the product free. In their case, they got brand awareness quite fast. But even though Google has Google One in the US if you want paid response, this forum frequently decries the lack of support.
The problem is the users who occupy the no-support space cannot be selected as consumers. When you try to do that, you will get an army of users who want to not pay but who do want support. They think they want no-support but they don't, and they will retroactively rebrand their reasons to be more than money.
That isn't bitterness or anything (I've always dealt with B2B software) but it's the reality of the thing as I can see.
I deal with a lot of small businesses and to me it feels like that entire sector of the industry is being abandoned. Most small businesses owners are practical and will pay for things when they need them, but they're fairly price sensitive and they expect good value for their money.
Take MS365 as an example. Most small businesses I deal with would be way better off with Exchange than with their current shared hosting email providers, but the value just isn't there for a lot of them. Microsoft thinks they're selling all this awesome stuff like Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, etc. in an ultra valuable bundle, but all small businesses see is Exchange plus a bunch of other bloat they're never going to use but are forced to pay for. They just want Exchange.
Plus, at least for the ones I've dealt with, the partner exclusively interacts with the customer, so bad support gets labelled as having a bad partner, not as Microsoft being bad. That also means Microsoft isn't incurring any cost to be the first point of contact either. In fact, the only time I've ever dealt with MS support for something Exchange related, they sucked. I ended up solving my own problem and closing the support issue by telling them what was wrong. Reputationally, we're the one that recommends it, we're the first point of contact for support, and we're the ones that take the reputation hit if something isn't working. At least that's my experience.
I see lots of small businesses that have 50 mailboxes for $60 / year at a shared hosting provider. That's $.10 per month per user. Guess how they react when you tell them moving to MS365 will be $5 per month per user? Now I'm not saying MS365 isn't worth more, but it's a HARD sell to tell a small business they should pay 50x for something that's currently working fine as far as they're concerned. Then you add in things like backup solutions changing per user per month and all of a sudden you're telling a small business they should pay 75x for the same feature matrix their shared hosting provider is selling them. They don't care about all the stupid value adds. In fact that stuff is negative value because it's unneeded complexity which results in frustration and increased support costs.
I think you answered your question right there. Microsoft does not want the business of a company where 50 mailboxes cost $60 for the whole year. They are happy to leave that market to other lower cost providers
It wouldn’t have to be that cheap though. If they sold Exchange only plans for $1-2 / user / month I could probably convince 10x the users it’s worth it. And they never deal with the customers.
It’s MUCH easier to sell someone another product at that point too. That’s literally the strategy (cross selling) Ballmer used to increase sales so much that he ended up owning part of MS.
even google charges $6+ a month for email. If they can't pay that tiny bit of money maybe they don't need a full featured product and its not a good market segment
Google is making money with users' emails contents and ads displayed in their interface, so that's not like they are doing that for free. In the case of airtable, I'm not sure non paying users are bringing them anything that can be monetized (I may just not be aware of vicious monetization ways though)
Sell me a no or very limited support plan then (or charge extra for the support when it's needed). At least personally, if your docs are halfway decent and I don't run into any major bugs I will almost never make a support request.
That's not quite right. It's not the support. It's the churn metrics. A guy who uses your system episodically can give the appearance of a high churn rate. This is very bad and if you're raising money can imply that your system isn't sticky which lowers your valuations. If you're in the fundraising game that's actually worse than a few extra dollars of revenue.
We need another law here... When everybody maintains bad measures despite knowing they don't work. Impact factors in science are another example of that. You can say it is broken and proove it, your jury for grants or positions will still ask you to put the numbers next to your papers, and if you don't they'll do it themselves...
Have you tried buying from salesforce? Very high touch, very expensive, very unfit for small businesses, hugely successful and widely used.
Different audiences, different approaches.
Many successful businesses are such that none of us have ever heard of, but are making millions, sometimes billions. We haven’t heard of them because we’re not the target market and talking to us is a waste of resources.
Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.
> Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks.
Because it works for them. I mean, they likely have customers for that $15k plan. And if they do, why would it be worth their time discussing <$24 plans that require extra dev time with you? (I don't mean it as a complaint - just awareness that for-profit companies will do for-profit things)
> Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access". Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but it is very disappointing that most do not.
Price discrimination is a hard problem! There's a conflict between soaking your customers for as much as they're willing to pay, and making your product accessible to customers that won't pay that much. Finding a feature set that the first set of customers absolutely needs and will pay extra for, but the second set can live without, is hard.
The problem is that pricing is expected to be the opposite of what it really should be. Companies with 10k users expect a discount, but the reality is they should be paying a lot more because building a product to serve 10k users is much harder than building a product to serve 10 users.
On the flipside, why should I, as a small user, share in the cost of things like scalability, HA, SLAs, etc.? I don't need those things.
Based on what I've seen in larger businesses, those things can be paper features. It doesn't matter if the small business edition has the same scalability and HA as the enterprise edition. Large businesses will still pay for the enterprise edition because they need to be able to show they paid for HA, etc. to cover their own asses if anything every goes wrong.
Charge for scalability and reliability, not features IMO.
Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are basic features any piece of software should have. Even a one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very shitty business model.
How much scalability does one person need? And no HA doesn’t mean “down for a month”. It means I have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there. And HA and backups aren’t even related, so...
One person could still require significant capacity - imagine an API with flight info, and your one person SaaS that does some magic with it by getting the data real time for all flights around the world.
> And no HA doesn’t mean “down for a month”. It means I have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there
No HA means downtime is expected and frequent ( baring crazy luck, but let's not base business on hope). If your invoicing, or project management, or note taking or whatever SaaS is down and you need it now to do something for a client of yours, how many hours of downtime can you accept?
> And HA and backups aren’t even related, so...
You said scalability and reliability, good backups are a part of reliability. If a SaaS cheaps on backups and HA for small time clients like one-person companies or small startups, and then a fire burns it all ( but not entreprise customers, because their backups are replicated to another DC), is it OK because they were small?
In some cases yes. I worked for a b2b company, which was not designed as multi-tenant and all their customers were under the same db and the same service. Now imagine response time for small business vs enterprises (yes they had a few of those paying premium, lol), sometimes the later was infinite.
It does seem odd for those "low code" tools to not have a way to deal with "external users". For example, it would be logical to create a tool for accepting job candidates. The internal facing piece would be limited to some reasonable number of users, but the outward facing piece would have to allow anyone to submit a record.
I do know that knack.com has a pricing model based on number of records instead of number of users. Might be an option for you, depending on how many records you have.
Airtable does allow you to create a publishable form view so that anyone can submit a new record.
You can also add read-only users to a base without having to pay for them. But giving them any kind of edit access (even just the ability to add comments to records) requires a full-fledged user account.
An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing. That shouldn’t be that hard to implement for airtable or any other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn’t offered.
I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a per minute license for this.
There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of people just log in once a month to see a single report and this was a useful way to get more users onboard.
It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand how many minutes you should buy.
Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though
That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost always be free.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with Airtable.
It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-term if their picks earn profit.
What use is switching to some messenger that no one you know uses?
Obviously you can always fall back on SMS and e-mail, probably, but that is a path to social isolation in many cases.
So, it’s not exactly the same as having two ISPs to pick from but to pretend that your choice is completely free and unconstrained is also a dangerous lie to tell yourself and others.
To solve this … well, I don’t know. Probably regulation? Benevolent tech giants that for some reason decide to push open, federated messengers?
I'm very excited to see this space heating up. It seems for years we defaulted to using Google Analytics and no one wanted in the market. Now there are plenty alternatives, with many of them open source.
That is why I usually try to avoid advice from people who (explicitly) give advice. It is better to observe what they do than what they say. Even if you wind up not enjoying the wealth, you’ll have understood it yourself and not be cursing yourself for not having tried. Except for life and death situations, and situations involving technical expertise, this applies to everything. Most of the time it is just our laziness selecting for examples of success that allow it to stay while reaping the benefits of working hard. A mind virus discouraging responsibility.
Whatever. There's a big difference between feeling inadequate while sitting in your third vacation home and working 40-60 hours a week at a job you hate because if you were doing what you actually wanted to do instead you'd be starving in a ditch somewhere by now.
Probably the best predictor of if you're going to be upset about people having more than you if you've got $10M is if you're upset about people having more than you when you have $100k.
There will always be people who have cooler stuff than you. If you get upset about it when the cool stuff isn't like stable housing, food security, and decent transportation, the problem isn't lack of funds, it's your attitude.
So what's the path from living with 4 other people working 40 hours a week at McDonald's to filthy rich? Haven't gone to college, don't have a skill that sets you apart (music/art/etc), and aren't particularly intelligent or scrappy. Seems to me there's literally no path from A to B.
Well for McD's it's getting into management and going to McD school and then getting a franchise. McD's likes to promote from within. There are quite a few millionaires who have done this. I mean I am sure you have to work hard to do this and it isn't guaranteed either. I think a lot of franchised businesses can work this way.
I personally know of a husband and wife who own 8 franchises in a region and were able to send their children to the best schools in the world. High school education for the parents. They did exactly what you said.
If there's ever a time to do it it's when all of information is virtually free. Unfortunately this also means there are an equal amount of cheap distractions.
You understand there is a large swath of the human race that just isn't that intelligent right? Saying "but the information is free!!!" means absolutely NOTHING to someone who can't comprehend it.
That's ignoring the fact you expect them to decipher which information is accurate and inaccurate. How exactly do you expect someone who lacks critical thinking skills to determine who is telling them the truth and who is lying? The fact there are hundreds of thousands to millions of US citizens who believe in Q-Anon should tell you how flawed your logic is.
Different advice for different circumstances. Do you get upset when elite athletes talk about the importance of avoiding overtraining, when they have already become elite?
Apples and oranges my friend. Being elite and overtraining are orthogonal. By definition, overtraining is pushing your body too far too fast. No one can train for a 100 mile race by doing 3 50 mile training runs in a week. That's not how physiology works. Discipline and lots of hard work can help you be elite, but overtraining is never good. Never.
Derek did not became wealthy. He gave the $22 million dollars he got from selling his company to a fund, and gets over $1000 each month, hardly "wealthy".
Derek has worked in a circus and knows how to live cheap enough. He also has lots of friends so he does not need to pay for lots of things.
I know people that earn in excess $10.000/month and spend it all or even get into debts.
>Derek Sivers transferred ownership of his company to a charitable remainder unitrust for music education, and had the trust sell it to Disc Makers. This agreement requires the trust to pay Sivers 5% of the trust's value annually (hypothetically $1,100,000 pretax, based on a sale price of $22 million as reported by Sivers)[4] until death, while upon death the remainder will ultimately go to charity.
So he actually earns around $90k per month. The foundation was also probably a tax dodge more than some altruistic thing.
He also acquired a second nationality, renounced US citizenship, and moved to a country that doesn't tax foreign sourced passive income. It's the most extreme example I've seen of planning your whole life around tax optimization.
Understandable though if you've read his book because he's had big problems with the IRS in the past and probably really wanted to show them his "FU money."
(I'd just like to acknowledge that my parent comment is pretty lousy. I don't know Derek and I'm making assumptions about his motives. I feel like it's fair game after his article "Why I gave my company to charity [1]" but I'm not proud of casting aspersions on internet celebrities. I have a jaded view of philanthropy and philanthropists that may be totally off in this case.)
It doesn't but all that means is the form for renouncing has a checkbox asking "are you doing this for tax reasons"? And you check "no". Then during the consular interview you spew some line about how you no longer have attachments to the US -- "I haven't been back in over 3 years, own no property, let my driver's license expire" and you do have attachments in your new country "All my friends are here and I even spend Christmas here!"
It is more of a retroactive "if we find out later you lied we now have a legal basis to add extra penalties" but in practice nobody is really checking or cares. The underfunded IRS doesn't care about the tiny number renouncing and the consular officials doing the interview certainly don't care.
Even if the reality is in the middle, the likely difference between 1k a month claimed and 90k a month claimed surely puts him in the very wealthy category.
I agree with other posters, it’s a little annoying to have wildly successful people talk about “being happy with what you have” and “money isn’t that important” and “enough” etc.
While the concept is absolutely correct, and I believe “if you weren’t happy before hitting the lottery you probably won’t be happy after”, be successful independently twice then talk to me about how it’s done.
On the other hand, there are many wealthy people who are unhappy, with their wealth or otherwise.
I had the honor (but not the pleasure) of working closely with a guy whose personal wealth was estimated at half a billion or so, all self made. There was nothing he wanted he couldn’t afford. And yet he was incredibly unhappy almost all the time - I caught an occasional glimpse of happiness from him after he would come back from a weekend fishing alone, or when some-list-or-other of wealthy people bumped his rank up in their listings.
When someone like like Sivers says “I was happy before the money and money didn’t make me happier”, I believe him.
In fact, I’ve known many people who made fortunes, and quite a few who lost fortunes and some who lost family to terror attacks. Other than a transient effect after specific events (good or bad), everyone reverted to their pre-event happiness levels.
Having money is an incredible daily-stress reliever. But according to my life experience, it has very little effect on happiness.
This falls in line with studies that show when most people hit the upper middle class, more money doesn’t automatically equate to happier. And if someone doesn’t have a purpose beyond money, I could see more money making them less happy. “What do I do now?”
I actually know Derek in real life (although not very well). He gave away most of his wealth, but he still draws a very comfortable salary from the fund he set up with the wealth that remains. He's rich.
I'm not sure where you heard the $1k/month figure, but there's no way he possibly makes that little. He lives in Oxford, possibly the most expensive city in the UK outside of London. $1k/month in Oxford isn't enough to rent a one-bedroom flat, without even considering other living expenses - there's no way he lives in Oxford on an income that low.
He didn't, he siphoned them in a "charity/fund" for tax purposes. That's a rich man's move 101. It only becomes an actual charity if he (knock on wood) dies young from my understanding...
