Anxiety in product development
I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant here.<p>Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.<p>For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You&#x27;ve got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are solved by third-party libraries. Your tech is a liability and eventually someone with better tech will be smart enough to study your customers, or the students who will eventually replace your inevitably-retiring customers on the front lines and push adoption going forward.<p>And this is okay. The advantage corporations have over government institutions is that they can be created and <i>destroyed</i> with much less friction.<p>If you&#x27;re lucky, your growth curve looks like double-sigmoid table-top. Probably it looks like an asymmetric Gaussian. What it doesn&#x27;t look like is an exponential. Understand where your product is in its life-cycle, and maximize ROI.