Good startups target power users. By "good" I mean companies that find true PMF and grow exponentially at near-zero CAC (i.e. the ones that earn - not buy - their growth).
Growth-oriented startups then run out of power users and start targeting the wider population; when the latter outnumber the former, power users fall by the wayside at best and are explicitly told to fuck off as uneconomical at worst.
Acquisition-oriented startups sell their power user base to a large company that’s unlikely to care about them and proceeds to tell them to fuck off (usually after some large-company-scale fleeting instant, like a couple of quarters).
That is why, most of the time, I now preemptively fuck off when I see a (VC-funded) startup targeting me as a power user of whatever they’re making. I’ve been burned too many times, and with all due respect to the cuddly techies running things at the moment, they don’t own the company.
Why is it that every single company only wants to serve the same one of those personas?
To me it's a disappointing effigy that the author is conjuring up and then burning because they're unwilling to address the fact that the corporation they work for and the ceaseless chase of "social media platforms" drives this behavior more than the imagined "Marl's" of the world ever did.
the fact that the corporations are doing that, and chasing the Marls is the foundational premise of the article. He's not blaming it on the Marls. He's blaming it on the companies chasing them.
There's cable TV.
To be fair though, cable TV was the original Poo-To-Marl Service and has been getting supplanted by free versions of itself. So I guess it proves your point anyway.
I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game.
Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, data passes through my servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month, which I can't justify without compensation.
I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.
People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to tell them to f-off.
People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.
But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even cover the costs of the sales channels.
That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be turning that back.
OTOH, for everyone of you (users willing to pay $1 for a tool that'll solve a problem they have every once in a while), I'm able to find 1000 that'll just install the ad supported app, use it that one time and forget about it (until the next time they need it).
Trust me: the barrier to get even $1 from a user for an app the majority uses once a week tops for a couple of minutes, is immense, especially if they can run it for free, in exchange for the annoyance of a single banner ad, that you can dismiss (and go full screen) after 30s, if you do use it longer than that.
But the free version must exist, for discoverablity if nothing else, and experience shows that degrading it to drive sales only jeopardizes total revenue. So ads it is.
But if I were a user of your app, I would personally prefer to pay you $5/yr for whatever "fancy upgrades" it would require for that to get you enough subscribers to be workable.
But this is a personal preference! It's definitely the case that most people prefer to use free (apologies, I don't know if this applies to your app, but it usually does) crap.
But I do think a niche of people like me totally exists, and is actually not that small.
As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:
Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.
This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".
> This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.
Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period.
Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have done.
So, my point is, that this dynamic exists even for things that you pay money for.
So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds like an application that isn't very good, but I don't think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I definitely don't think charging money is any kind of guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots of software sucks just because it sucks.
But the difference I see is that I think Navionics Boating has an incentive to make that app better. That if they make improvements for users like you, that will likely impact their bottom line positively, because they'll attract and retain more users like you.
But free mass-market consumer apps have the opposite incentive. They are incentivized to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, because there will always be > 1 user that they attract with that approach for every 1 user like you that they alienate.
Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.
I think that only works if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.
I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.
Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:
(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).
(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.
I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).
To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).
Whenever I express a negative sentiment about some aspect of modern software that takes away power and choice from the user in favor of baby-tier handholding and get the usual reply that goes something like "well the average user doesn't need or care about that so it shouldn't exist!", this is who I imagine typing out the comment on the other side of the screen.
If this were true, the app probably wasn't worth having in the first place. An app that actually does something Marl needs, or enables him to do something he wants to do doesn't need to catch his attention with shiny things. The thing that will hook Marl is accomplishing what he set out to do, and generally that should be possible without spending a bunch of time customizing settings, but having sensible defaults doesn't mean those options/settings aren't valuable.
Marl doesn't need to change, and it'd be a shame if he (most users) were forced to tinker with a bunch of settings and change a bunch of defaults to do the things they want. Flexibility and customization is still important for the folks who need that though and useful software that does a good job offering that while also having sane defaults have an opportunity to be popular with everybody.
And if the app does the things you want for Marl, then, as the article states, it makes all economic sense to make the app worse for Marl to catch Narl. Marl will use it anyway (since for him the app was worth having in the first place), but your effort will make a difference in getting Narl.
And if you can make the app really good for Narl as well, that doesn't change anything, because there always will be another marginal user, and there is a financial motivation to add all the shiny bullshit (at the expense of everyone else) to catch that marginal user.
I guess you're right. Marl wouldn't be a marginal user. The economic sense of attracting the marginal user Narl still only holds true to a point. Make the app bad enough by appealing to Narl and you'll lose Marl to a competing app that doesn't suck as bad. Narl is fickle, doesn't really need the app, and will be easily tempted to move on to other apps. Not a great long term investment. Marl needs the app and as long as it does what he needs without pissing him off the app has got a user they can profit from. It seems very shortsighted to drive away your core users to temporarily attract the less interested marginal ones.
Thankfully, I can't think of many apps that have gotten worse by aggressively targeting the Narls of the world. When apps get worse, it's usually greed that gets in the way. Anti-features that even narl hates, but which stuffs the developer's pockets with cash.
What's crazy to me is that 25+ million people on this Earth can program, and how many of them get to decide the UIs that everyone else uses? I myself, suck at UI programming. But that's because UI programming is labyrinthine, arcane, and generally requires becoming an expert in a number of extremely poorly thought-out frameworks that are often stupendously complicated. (Web, I am looking at you.)
Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and rearrange it the way I want? And I mean, far more than toolbars and rearranging drop down menus. (BTW, remember those? Those were great).
Seriously though, I have written many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in my day; I fancy myself not super bad at programming, yet I cannot take apart a random GUI app and make it do what I want. Even when it's open source. I feel like this is an unaddressed problem; the UI cafeteria people keep serving us an ever-changing menu of crap, and I feel powerless to even lock in the few UIs that I do end up getting good at. They'll take that away soon enough.
It'd probably have to be free, fast, secure, simple, attractive, flexible, able to work with all kinds of platforms/screens/inputs, and make creating GUIs easier for programmers, but even then it'd have to content with companies who want control over what users see, artists who think they know better than everyone else, and support teams that want documentation full of meaningful screenshots.
IMO there's no reason you can't. Just yesterday I was playing with pavucontrol and thought "There needs to be a GNU Radio like view, where I can drop boxes which represent sound generating/taking programs/devices and draw connecting lines arbitrarily," then I thought why not the same thing for video treating even the contents of windows themselves as video sources too!
Table formats are easier to implement I guess...
Because it is very hard to do something like this, so common people can do it. (you can change every html UI in theory)
I tried to make something like this and basically failed (though in the very long run I might get there eventually). GUI editors are hard to get right and the ones I liked, like Adobe Flex Builder (with Flash UI as a bonus) are gone. But those were also no newb tools. But flash itself was and that was the main reason for its success.
And you get the data through API calls - so in theory one can build your own UI on top of a known service. There are rare examples of this done succesfully (for HN for example), but usually you won't get very far in a reasonable amount of time, because often it is a mess behind the shiny UI. (And because this is not encouraged behavior by the service provider)
another one that i'd like to think has an open enough API is mastodon/fediverse, assuming they actually adhere to the activitypub spec, it should (should) be relatively straightforward to write a UI on top of the API. And it seems ok, there's quite a number of mastodon "apps", but less for stuff like misskey or pleroma.
I'm sure there are other contemporaneous examples, but suffice to say that some developers still care about this, today!
You know how the saying goes: The best things in life are Free Software!
Pretty much, yeah.
But are you really that different? There are just too many websites amd apps and new ones are getting generated every moment and time and attention is limited. So I also open and quickly close many of them.
I don't think that is the problem here.
But to your conclusion I agree.
The problem is that every group of power users has their own idea of what they want, and they're _very_ stubborn about providing features that they don't personally use or like.
I've run across these, though I can't find the link now, there was a suite of "apps for power users like us", compile 'em from source, if you don't like that then go fuck yourself.
Which is a fine way to limit who asks for tech support, but it's not much of a market.
This is hilarious and sad because it feels too accurate. Damnit Marl, please for the sake of us power user minority, please change.
Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users. I'm not optimistic though. Open source seems like the only real hope there.