A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money.
Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.
But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.
Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users left.
Exactly this. Medium was great at what it did, but having raised $160M+ in funding and being valued at several billion dollars they simply could not continue to be a simply blogging platform while also making enough money to keep investors happy. And all their bets to become profitable just ended up alienating their users and writers.
YouTube has become pretty bad IMO.. All the ads and Google data mining.
Without a suite of adblockers and sponsorblock it's unusable now. I hate video content anyway so I wouldn't sign up for a subscription. But every time I get referred there I'm appalled how bad it's become.
A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money.
Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.
But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.
Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users left.