Sadly that often amounts to being more heavily marketed

That has been the game, money was "free" and VCs wanted that unicorn status. But that is also a huge liability.

When the asteroid came, only the small mammals survived.

Of course I'm talking about one way that could possibly lead to a sucessful business. There are many ways, nothing is garanteed but that also applies to failure.

That means the TAM is fully owned and you have to work that much harder to grab a slice.

"Competition is for losers."

I suppose if you're really passionate about the space, go ahead, but it's incredibly crowded with dozens of players. Some are even owned by the fintech giants.

There's a whole ecosystem of adjacent services-for-SMBs providers in hosting, domains, online advertising etc. and all the companies are running the "commoditize their products complements" playbook. Anyone trying to enter the market is competing against prices that don't even make sense in isolation.

I'm curious, have MBAs made anything better for the masses, ever?

Couldn't you ask the same of most programmers? One way or another, everybody is pushing paper or pixels. Is the adtech developer at Google, FB, Amazon somehow morally superior to a finance bro that takes a job at Carlyle Group?

Depends on how you interpret what a programer's role and skin in the game is. by the Google/FB/Amazon level, the programmer is just another cog in the machine being told what to make by a director, who reports to/with some MBAs.

For smaller companies, I'd say programmers have done their share of good and evil. the AI sector is in real time gray area with some very malicious actions not too long ago to try and be first to market.

Better here usually means finding a path to lower cost of acquiring customers.

Of course retention helps too but my gut is that Squarespace had reasonably low churn but increasingly elevated customer acquisition costs along with no real enterprise traction.