

Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Alien Skin Software - spencerfry
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2536-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-alien-skin-software

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patio11
_Don’t undercharge. Once you are confident that your product is great, don’t
be shy with your price. The smart people will pay for it. The whiners will
leave. We had a product for a while that was much cheaper than our other
products. Those customers required far more tech support than the
professionals who use our other products. It was a relief when we discontinued
it._

I cannot repeat this lesson enough, and this is the thirtieth time I have
heard another company chime in with it. Charging a premium means your worst
customers go afflict a competitor instead.

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maukdaddy
Beat me to it :p

One thing that really sticks out to me here is the emphasis on _NOT_ growing
too large. I think this is a management view that is going to grow
increasingly common in the future.

Despite years of pounding in our heads that growth is the only avenue to
success, people are finally realizing that great culture, lifestyle, and
profitability are enough. Sure, some people will never have _enough_ and will
continue to grow for the sake of growing. But the idea that you can lead a 20
person company for many years and enjoy the profits is very tantalizing to a
lot of us Gen Y-ers that watched parents work themselves to death.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
It really looks like that's a preferable future than the one we currently
suffer with: large, immovable conglomerates that lobby for an upper hand in
the market, have an open disdain for employee culture (i.e., the "take all the
fun out of making video games" quote from Activision CEO, who probably
wouldn't be anything without absorbing the then small-company Blizzard for
World of Warcraft), and will outsource core competencies for the quarterly
concall to sound 10% better over same quarter last year.

I think the larger advantage is that, because of smaller nimbler companies,
there is keener, more increased competition, leading to better products and
more reasonable prices. Because of the lowered overhead inherent in smaller
companies, more of them can be spread out. If you look at the wasteland that
is the midwest right now, they could really use smaller companies dotting the
landscape that work on all the sexy (hell, even unsexy or staid or sterile)
industries that were heretofore dominated by gigantic conglomerates like
Micrsoft, GE, Medtronic, EA and others.

The days of "get big fast" is over. It caused web 1.0 to crash and burn; but
from that there is a more mature 2.0, which companies like Facebook, 37
Signals, github, twitter, Valve represent and who are starting to inspire
others.

If small business truly represents the largest employer in the US, we have
almost a national moral imperative to eschew building (and supporting!) large
corporations and multinationals in favor of small ones, don't we?

