A manifesto needs life support
I really enjoyed this post from Herman, the creator of Bear Blog. He wants Bear Blog to be around for decades to come, and he’s making plans accordingly. That’s a wonderful thing. Pagecord has a very similar philosophy to Bear Blog – open source, independent, freemium, no ads, no dependencies, maintained by a single person. It’s just nowhere near as popular.
There are table stakes for being able to make a manifesto stance like Herman. For a product to survive in the long term in this way it needs either a critical mass of customers to give it life support, or it needs a generous benefactor (BDFL even). Or both.
Pagecord doesn’t yet have the critical mass required, so I’m the benefactor. Fine for now, but I’m no longer in my early 30s (I barely remember that far back!). It just about washes its face, but growth is slow and there’s no obvious route out of here other than time, patience, experimentation… and hope.
We live in a competitive world. Not every service can be lucky enough to get out alive (there’s always luck involved). Products are pretty much always built with the best of intentions for long term survival, but there’s only so much grind, time and money people are willing to pour into something to try and reach that survival tipping point. If you can’t make it happen, your product is going to die in the chasm. That’s life.
When this happens and your rug is pulled, try not to be hard on the founders. Especially bootstrapped solo founders who’ve put in years of labour for a love that isn’t returned. They probably tried their hardest to make it all work, this just wasn’t their time.