Interim note 2: business thoughts
– Baldur
Bjarnason
A few thoughts on my freelance and ebook business. Random and somewhat incoherent.
- A deregulated US poses a significant risk to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Banking, transaction system, or payment disruptions disproportionally harm SMBs. For example, a larger business is likely to be able to weather a month-long disruption to their primary payment system – they have the resources and credibility to quickly set up a replacement if they don’t already have one – but if Lemon Squeezy threw a wobble this month, I’d effectively be screwed.
- I actually do have a backup provider set up-- one that I don’t like as much but would work – but the cash flow disruption would put me in trouble.
- This is one of the many reasons why going all-in on an app store is a potentially catastrophic strategy for a software provider.
- This just reinforces the need for diverse income streams for a business like mine. Alternate formats such as video or audio might play a role here.
- I think high-level, research-heavy, slightly informal but practically-oriented books like mine – Out of the Software Crisis and The Intelligence Illusion – are probably a long-term dead end in the business sense. Not that they haven’t done well, but in that follow-ups would have diminishing returns. Reforming software dev management is not a mainstream interest in tech. The topic mostly appeals to people who are already trying to do the right thing.
- What you want are topics where follow-ups build on earlier releases.
N + M%sales, effectively, whereNare prior sales, andMis the percentage increase of those prior sales due to word of mouth. - “AI” certainly isn’t that topic. It’s hideously boring – in a dismal, “I can’t believe they’re pulling this bullshit”, kind of way – and once you’ve pointed out the numerous practical issues with it, the only path forward is to go into the political or social impact, or the deeper academic research side of it. Those approaches are both out of my wheelhouse and bad business: mainstream non-fiction requires the credibility and marketing of mainstream media.
- I think systems-thinking and software development could have been a decent topic for a small education business like mine, but it’s transparently obvious that modern software dev management has thoroughly rejected the idea. The layoffs and “AI” adoption are just the latest symptoms.
- On the demand side, in a previous note I made this here observation based on Amy Hoy’s principles for building up customer-driven businesses: “Sustainability comes from outside mainstream tech.”
- What this means in business terms for me is that the shifting economics of software development at big companies seem likely to make them very poor prospects for a small training, information, or education business. This is an issue because most software developer discussions on sites like Reddit are driven by people in mainstream tech – the exact same crowd that’s getting hit the hardest by layoffs, budget cuts, and the shift to LLMs both by the devs themselves and in the products they work on.
- But, there are a lot of people working in web dev at customer-driven SMBs, smaller organisations, and in isolated corners at institutions, and many of those aren’t necessarily software businesses either. So, I think there’ll still be some demand for practical web dev advice. The question is how to discover that demand – what it’s specifically for.
- There’s also the question as to whether the ongoing deterioration of the software ecosystem in general might not be an opportunity for new customer-oriented software businesses.
- As I’ve noted elsewhere, my freelancing took a hit a while back. Over the past five years or so, my freelance gigs were pretty evenly split between research-oriented projects funded through grants and education and training gigs connected to mainstream tech companies. The education and training gigs evaporated pretty much as soon as the AI Bubble took off. In the past I thought it evaporated because of my AI criticism but in hindsight the timing doesn’t fit. It looks more like the gigs evaporated first, but I didn’t notice because I was busy working on the ebooks.
- I’ve always been a sucker for research-oriented projects. Basically, I’ve generally always been up for it when somebody approaches me saying something like, “we’re applying for a grant to do a bit of a weird project but we need a tech/dev person, are you interested?” It’s always been a numbers game. Few pan out, but some do. But over the past couple of years fewer and fewer of these projects have been getting the funding they applied for.
- Suffice to say that the past couple of years have been rough financially.
- It feels like all of these are dots that I should be able to connect to form a cohesive picture. I think mainstream web dev is in a pretty horrible place, while at the same time I also think there are probably a number of niches within web dev that are in very interesting places.
- Another niche is writing and reading. Most of my professional work over the past couple of decades has centred on digital publishing and reading. Writing tools also exist in the cross-section between those two. Though, if there is any industry that’s more dysfunctional than tech, that would be publishing.