💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

Sep 30, 2024

All the stuff about “sorry you can’t watch/use this because you are in the wrong country” feels so ancient.
Definitely feels like someone will build this and in a few years we will wonder how we ever worried about this at all.

💰Accountants

Whoever finally figures out how to disrupt accountants will get extremely rich and do so much good for the world.
Accountants tend to charge outrages rates, always only do the absolute bare minimum, and rely on you for double checking their work.
So much creative energy is wasted by people worrying about dumb tax stuff.

🧘 Peaceful Content

Seems like there is some serious appetite for more mundane content.
I always thought it’s a bit ridiculous that so much entertainment is centred around a tiny subset of human experiences (murder, breakups).
Getting a glimpse into normal lives provides a much richer experience than the same old plot lines for the hundredth time.
The movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a good example.

🤒 WordPress

Open Source always sounds great but oftentimes is just a term used for marketing purposes.
Tons of VC funded companies use this playbook: build “open source alternative” to X → make it hard/confusing to self-host → make tons of money selling hosting services
WordPress, for a long time, seemed like an exception to this rule. There were many hosting providers and hosting a Wordpress site isn’t particularly complicated.
Things seemed to have changed since Automattic, the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, raised a fat $300M Series D round.
Recently Matt decided that he should try to extort a “licensing fee” from competitor hosting company WP Engine.
Turns out open source only means so much if there is one guy holding the keys to the kingdom.
This post is the best summary of the recent drama. Also see this previous drama where Matt made it very clear that rules apply to everyone but him.
Thus while Matt failed to execute the standard open source playbook, he’s now convinced he found the lever that allows him to revenue-maxx. The crux of the matter is that all plugins are centrally hosted on WordPress.org, a site solely owned by Matt Mullenweg. So when he decides to block someone from accessing the site, automatic plugin updates/installs no longer work which leads to huge security problems.
I hope this ends with WordPress becoming more decentralised (WordPress.org mirrors emerging with an easy way to switch between them) and competitors not controlled by a dictator getting new users.
Imo most sites nowadays should just be collections of static files. A dynamic system like WordPress is much harder to keep safe and performant. And there isn’t really any reason for using a database for most sites. E.g. no one uses website comments anymore.
Hosting static files costs virtually nothing and the attack surface is much, much smaller.
Hugo and Jekyll are interesting options but still too hard to use for most people.
I think there is huge potential for a WP admin like UI that can be used to create posts and manage the design etc. But when you click publish, it simply deploys the whole site as static files.

😿 Product Hunt

Speaking of companies losing the plot….
For a long time, ProductHunt was a cornerstone of the startup/indie maker ecosystem. It’s where everyone went to announce they created something new. The “Product of the Day” label held a lot of weight.
For the most part it was a fair competition. Anyone could post new projects. Users voted. The most-voted projects surfaced to the top. If you had an audience you could ask them for support and increase your chances a bit to get one of the top spots. This worked within limits. You could give your project a little boost but ultimately projects only stayed near the top when people outside your audience upvoted them too. There were always people trying to game the algorithm but often they were caught and banned. Unnatural voting patterns were usually visible in the upvote distribution charts. Interesting new projects were posted almost every day.
This changed rapidly after ProductHunt was acquired by AngelList in 2017.
Their main concern became clear quickly: steer the focus away from indie makers towards VC-funded startups. This is the community AngelList is selling to. Also these are the companies willing to pay ProductHunts outrages ad rates ($55 to show your ad to 1000 people with zero targeting). After all, they are spending other people’s money.
So all kinds of rules were introduced to keep indie makers away.
I’m sure this boosted revenue numbers for a few quarters.
But now things seem to come crashing down. Traffic numbers are declining fast, the comment section is dominated by bots.
The people currently in charge seem out of touch with the ecosystem. The CEO hired a buddy as CTO who doesn’t even know who Pieter Levels is. That should be evidence enough.
They don’t seem to understand that the lines between “indie maker” and “startup founder” are blurry and always have been. Brian Armstrong was shipping all kinds of silly little side projects before starting Coinbase, to name just one example. Most founders do.
Silly little side projects were always was kept ProductHunt fresh and interesting. There was always free value. People building and shipping things just for the sake of it with no grand monetisation plan; or any plan really. That’s what made people coming back day after day. There was a real sense of community.
Now the feed is just a list of polished products. It’s roughly as exciting as browsing a category page on Capterra.
People have always tried to build ProductHunt alternatives but now it feels like finally the time has come where a serious alternative emerges.

End Note

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