Your Exit Strategy Dream Is My Customer Nightmare

Photo by Ilias Gainutdinov on Unsplash

I’ve always been a believer in human relationships. Whenever possible, I always prioritize direct dialogue. I’ve never been a fan of abstractions when it comes to relationships.

Just like in the IT world, I am convinced that you can usually solve much more with a direct conversation than with a thousand intermediate steps. Too many layers, even if theoretically sound, just complicate things.

And this is one of the reasons I’ve always tried, as much as possible, to avoid overcomplicating the relationship with my clients. It’s why I have always sought, as much as possible, to engage with businesses where I can speak with people, not “offices” or “departments”.

Take the example of the roof repairs on my house: I spoke with the people who did the work. They did an excellent job and even fixed things I hadn’t mentioned because, in their words, “a satisfied customer is a customer who will call back”. A few days earlier, “large, structured” companies had sent completely different quotes without even looking at our roof. “The people we send will assess it then, but we’ll instruct them to do what’s in the quote”. It was schematic, inflexible. Probably efficient from their point of view, but not from mine. Replaceable by AI? Of course: X square meters of roof, Y job, Z per square meter -> cost is €W. Without anyone truly caring about what my roof might actually need.

For this very reason, I dislike talking to salespeople. It’s one thing when I’m buying a product (with verifiable features, etc.), but it’s different when I’m buying a service or a consultation. Salespeople do their job, which is to sell. And they try to sell what they don’t have, what they don’t know, and what I don’t need. The better they are, the more they sell me things I don’t need. And, frankly, I don’t like that very much.

This is why I prefer to talk to the person who actually provides the service. The one who gets their hands “dirty”. But many people love to create a structure, an abstraction. Even when it’s not necessary.

A few days ago, I identified an open-source software solution with two versions, a “community” and an “enterprise” one, but it still seemed approachable. I quietly started running some tests and realized that this solution might be suitable for offering some new services to both current and new clients. Something new and innovative, yet consistent with my philosophy. As I often do, I did some research on the company behind it. I discovered it was a tiny company with extremely low revenue – so low that my contribution could, at least in part, help it grow. Not because my business would be huge, but because it could provide visibility in a market where they currently have no presence. Noticing how few people were in the company, I decided to contact the dev/founder/CEO directly.

A human connection, to understand the project’s direction, to see if it was the right fit for my needs, and to potentially fund the development of features I was interested in. I would also explain that, given the cost and my trust in the product, I would use the “enterprise” licenses for my clients, bringing further revenue to their business.

As I often do in these cases, I proceeded on two fronts: I opened a support ticket asking about the status of support for a specific operating system, and I sent a private message to the dev/founder/CEO on one of the platforms where the company is active, briefly explaining my idea.

After a few minutes, the private message was declined (I’m not even sure if it was read), and the ticket received a terse reply, something like “that OS is not officially supported”. Period. They didn’t even get to the next part, the one where I would have funded development and provided my clients with the enterprise version.

This kind of shutdown is disheartening. Of course, not every startup thinks this way, and the search for a scalable business model is perfectly legitimate. But when exponential growth becomes the only metric for success, the value of the customer and the product gets lost in the process.

It’s not the first time, and in different forms, I notice a fairly common pattern nowadays: a certain market just isn’t of interest. They want massive clients – or they’d rather shut down the project. It’s not a mindset of “hey, I have an idea and I want to build it”, but rather “how can I make mountains of money in a short time? Let me find an idea that might work”. Why does everyone dream of being the multi-million-dollar startup with a product that “disrupts the market”, while giving up on a healthy, organic, clean path of gradual growth?

It’s as if success has been reduced to a single metric: financial gain, where the ultimate satisfaction is purely economic. Betraying your own principles – or the trust of the customers who got you there – doesn’t matter. Building a business has become a kind of checklist. The original idea, the founder’s spirit, the unique tenacity – none of it matters as much as just following the steps: chase the current hype, promise the world, and do whatever it takes to get to the next stage.

All or nothing. Either you’re Elon, or you’re a nobody. I recently witnessed a similar situation with one of my clients. Their business was doing well, growing linearly and steadily. They were well-regarded in their market, competent, and valuable. But at a certain point, I saw their best developers leaving due to “disagreements over company policy”. I’ve stayed in touch with many of them, and they explained that they were becoming mere cogs in a machine. In my next meeting with the owners, they told me that their business would be winding down, potentially even closing. “Why? It seems like things are going well!” Their response: “Yes, but we didn’t dominate the market. The profits and growth are good, but not exponential. We need to find a new idea, hoping this time it’s the game-changer”.

Going back to the software, I simply wrote it off. I realized I can’t trust the product or the company. They lost a good opportunity, but maybe they don’t care. Their primary goal isn’t to sustain their product and their idea. They are just developing something to make a lot of money. If they succeed, they’ll sell it to the highest bidder (who will then likely perform an enshittification on it just to monetize as much as possible). If they fail, they’ll abandon it and move on to something else.

I’ll move on to something else – perhaps less suitable, but something that gives me more guarantees of continuity. Because in my mind, there are still figures like Federico Faggin – who left Intel to found his own company, Zilog, because he wanted to continue working on processors when, for Intel, they were just a tool to sell more memory. And there are countless examples like that, of people who had an idea and wanted to extend it, expand it, and then, why not, make money from it. When I witness the opposite – the idea that the goal is a huge, quick profit and the idea itself is secondary… well, I move on.

Not my cup of tea.

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