Self-serve first: an overlooked paradigm underlying great software companies
Meh. The company I&#x27;m at is in the exact same situation as the &#x27;self serve&#x27; company described, taking the low end of the market while a larger company fails to do so. The way we approach enterprise is uncannily similar to the way they described the other company doing so: use our API which does the hard domain specific stuff. Except we&#x27;re the opposite of self serve.<p>Virtually every customer pays us for technical support, and our developer (I&#x27;m effectively the only one), talks to customers practically every day about what they need in the product and to our services staff about their challenges. The insight this provides is invaluable.<p>Companies in the market with dozens&#x2F;hundreds of developers are worse at deploying new features than we are with a single developer (yes, I write tests and use industry best practices for my stack, extra work up front, but development is waaaay faster years later). Think ViaWeb&#x27;s Lisp advantage, except our real secret weapon is just that 1 developer who talks to all their customers and their services department is as good as 20 who don&#x27;t (I&#x27;m using C#&#x2F;Vue for web [with an erlang like actor framework I built] and C++&#x2F;Lisp for embedded).<p>There are certainly challenges scaling, and dear lord am I underpaid (I&#x27;m more interested in autonomy than the 3x-10x money I&#x27;d get from moving to a competitor), but self serve is orthogonal to our customer appeal. (Others in the market might actually think we&#x27;re self serve though, just because our software is user friendly and self serve is actually possible).