Re:Handmade: A Community for Self-Rolled Performant Software...
by phendrenad2 on Monday August 17, 2020 @01:14PM
(#24189283)
Speed is a very real selling point for software though. If your competitor takes 6 months to get to market, and then is locked-in to a bloated, sluggish, badly-architected codebase made from 50 abstraction layers, you have plenty of time to come in later and steal their userbase, when your project is done and can do things in 1/10th the time.
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Re:Handmade: A Community for Self-Rolled Performant Software...
by phtrivier on Monday August 17, 2020 @02:00PM
(#24189884)
My prior in such a situation would be to assume that "stealing userbase" is very hard. It depends on the kind of application, of course, but once you have paying / committed user, I'd assume the friction to change (and natural risk/change aversion )would be in favor of the incumbent.
That being said, arriving afterwards with a message of "we're like X,but faster" could be a good marketing catch, but probably not for any kind of enterprise app. (The only good marketing catch in this case would be "we're like X, but cheaper.")
No idea how such an hypothesis could be tested. We would need records of user switching from an app to another.