How would you market such a business in 2026? I am from an Italian region where farmer grow many special coltures, and I was always a bit surprised why they don’t try selling on the internet. I ended up convincing myself it is not a viable business model.
I live in Sweden, and almost every year I discover someone I work with or have friends in common with, who has a friend or relative in Italy, or Greece who farms oranges/olives/cheese or what have you. And this friend in Sweden is selling their produce by word of mouth.
So once a year at harvest, the relative has someone drives a truck full of olive oil 2000 kilometers north, and dozens of Swedes turn up at an appointed time on a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot to pick up their order of six bottles of oil. The prices are no better than in the supermarket, but ostensibly you’d get a high quality product.
It’s a funny way to do business in 2025, completely without Internet infrastructure. Somehow, I don’t think it would work as a web shop.
I know it does for a small Dutch setup :) https://www.kalamatakarma.com/ Marketing is still completely word of mouth afaik, but the webshop makes it easier for total strangers to tag along.
I’m sure taxes are part of it, but keep in mind it’s a toll free union after all. They could easily do this above board and just declare the Italian VAT as they do selling to locals.
I'd still lean into a great .com domain, as it still gives you instant credibility. Also leverage Facebook, as my typical buyer hangs out there a good bit. YouTube has been helpful as well, as we try to share "behind the curtain" what life is like as a Vidalia farmer.
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
My experience has been just the opposite. While I developed solid technical skills, my focus was on developing soft skills. However, all the management jobs I've seen hire based on programming rather than management skills.
The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.
A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
I run a small IT consultancy in EU mostly for companies with factories, so I have some biases. I have a few issues with the way IT leadership in EU has been running things the past 20 or so years:
- Absolutely 0 care for having a de-risked supply chain. In fact, IT leaders are extremely happy to have fewer and fewer suppliers, I think it is even one of their goals! And look at it now, what to do when 70% of your company runs on Microsoft and this happens?
- Buy always, no matter what the process is, just buy more tools. So what could have been 1 Python script now is a 5 years contract with yet another US supplier, all data stored in proprietary formats locked under complex APIs of course
- Bundle everything, and I mean everything, in the ERP. Make the ERP so big and complicated that adding anything to it requires tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and multiple months of "development" (as an aside, did you know SAP ABAP code is stored in a database???)
- Lock yourself up completely with whatever Cloud provider you decide to use. Using AWS? Let's do everything with lambdas! Because, who cares about being Cloud agnostic and de-risking your AWS investment?
- Never invest in your internal tech talent, always go after shiny new tech solutions that deliver at best 20% of what they promise, while good motivated employees could have delivered 80% at a fraction of that cost
- Never push back on business asking for specific tools just because the vendors of such tools are amazing at marketing. 90% of manufacturing companies could replace Salesforce with much simpler tools (who knows, maybe even EU based?) and save millions. But no, let's go after brands and never consider the actual 1) business process we are trying to improve; 2) the reference architecture; 3) the underlying data we want to do CRUD on
The re-thinking of the tech stack is not a US tariffs issue, it is an IT leadership problem, and a serious one. The overwhelming lack of understanding of simple risk management strategies has gotten us here, EU companies should never, ever, have put themselves in this position in the first place.
> I have a few issues with the way IT leadership in EU has been running things the past 20 or so years
I'm not disagreeing, but you are mistaken if you think this is just an EU thing. It's everywhere. I seems to be driven by two things.
One is focus on the knitting - and outsource everything else. Everything else includes your security infrastructure - which you outsource to Active Directory running on Azure, or Okta. Amazing, since both have been ripped new ones in spectacular fashion.
The second is de-risking requires redundancy. Redundancy is expensive, and worse hard. It means you have to deal with multiple suppliers and glue them together. That requires internal expertise, but you just outsourced the external expertise so you could stick to your knitting.
Because in the industries I have experience in IT has typically very little to do with the type of efficiency that matters in manufacturing. For instance, moving a factory from Germany to Romania is going to give you faster and more predictable savings than, say, optimizing production with IT and automation (obviously take this example with a grain of salt and the usual "it depends").
The theory was that Industry 4.0 should somehow change that, at least in Europe, by adding more automation and tech to production. I have seen only 1 factory built that way and, let me say, it was a complete mess IT wise. There is also the issue that the same people that were building factories in the 90s are now also building the "new" factories.
I wonder how much of this drop can be simply explained as having reached a certain industry maturity. I assume at some point most of the fundamentals are in place, so we need less people?
Programming isn't an industry, per se. It's a skill, like accounting, sales, communications or law. There are definitely many businesses for which it's a core strength, but any large company has some need for it.
Maturity is definitely an issue. If you listen to what the industry is selling these days it's pretty much just AI. Before that it was DeFi and VR. There hasn't been a new smartphone since.. the smartphone.
The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.
The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost.
People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.
And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).
People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing.
As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.
You don't hate teams. I hate teams. Because it's ultra-slow and bloated, and used to eat 1.5 CPU cores all the time until I threw it permanently on a browser window. And now it doesn't notify me when other people send me a message.
Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.
> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
I absolutely cannot stand Office. Word is basically acceptable, but I refuse to use PowerPoint unless absolutely forced to. The major problem though is that every single component is blighted by the Ribbon, which among all the bad things that Microsoft has done is the worst.
> People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
This is worthy of some sources, no? People on HN, technology professionals, might hate office. But we're not majority and I've never seen researched/polled numbers about hating office...
I doubt that there are any reputable sources you could find that aren't shaped by bias (of MS or competitors). However, I have worked in a non-IT related job for years and about 90% of complaints about software we use would fit into one of two buckets
1.) Microsoft Office
2.) SAP
I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family
The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control.
IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.
The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.
> That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.
Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.
Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI.
So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.
Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).
I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)
That doesn't seem to be accurate. [0] [1] Microsoft consistently does mistakes that put its customers at risk, like being unable to secure their development environment so that when encryption keys leak in a badly sanitized dump into the dev environment they are almost immediately misused by other state actors against the US federal agencies. [2] How can you trust anything that comes out of the development if you cannot be reasonably sure about the security of it? And we cant really trust Microsoft reports either because of "Inaccurate public statements" (euphemism for lying). [0]
And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.
Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.
It's not about data, it's about being pre-installed in the OS, being first to market, being the default at school, bundled as an office pack with other tools, networks effects as people already know it it's easier to continue to use it etc. Where the data is stored is secondary.
Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.
Yes. Data can and will be used against people wether it's petty scamming or political/war operations. If there is uncontrolled prolifiration of personal data it makes this much easier to exploit
ONLYOFFICE supports this. The webservice they host supports different "storage backends", which can be something they offer, or Dropbox, or your own Nextcloud instance, etc.
"Storage backend" is not a "storage frontend" I'm talking about.
Example scenario:
As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.
To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.
When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.
Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.
NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".
When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.
Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.
Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).
In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.
The end of Microsoft in Europe will be its poor security.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are
cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty
bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines,
and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the
complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller,
more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to
partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have
them do.
The EU has compelled companies to switch to Microsoft — yes, you read that correctly. The EU introduced the GDPR law, which significantly increased the complexity of using third-party services. To minimize this complexity, companies found it more straightforward to consolidate their services with Microsoft, as it facilitates easier compliance with EU GDPR regulations.
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.
That seems like checkbox-compliance theater. Also doesn't seem to be supported by official findings. There are notions that actually you cannot be fully GDPR compliant with Microsoft 365. [0] Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings. [1]
I struggle to make the VC math work on Substack. They take a 10% cut on paid subscriptions. They need 1 billion in paid subscriptions to have a $100m revenue, which at a hopefully 30% ebit would put them in the $0.5-1 billion evaluation (maybe). Now, at an average of $200 of paid subscribtions, it would take 5m paid users to achieve a 1 billion revenue.
If we assume a very generous paid / non paid user ratio of 10%, it means Substack needs 50m total users to have 5m paid users.
You tell me, that with 50m users, Substack would be content to make “only” $100m per year?
Well, the counterexample is all those writers trying to setup some open source system for their blog, or move to some competing service.
This leaves two possibilities
1. They are financial idiots
2. The competing services are also priced/costed at a similar amount to substack, such that the writers can afford to pay the difference for ideological reasons.
That competition exists for substack is telling enough, that there's still money to be made here.
As for whether $100m is enough, substack is an very cheap platform to run. It can be run by a craiglist sized team if must. It is cheaper than any major publication, by virtue of not having either writers nor editors on staff.
All the additional cost and VC requirement for substack came from it paying big dollars to attract famous writers, which it is no longer doing (And fired the teams managing those relations).
There's also nothing stopping substack from adding ads to the free-users, much like how netflix does it. There's plenty of ways to monetize 50m users without infringing on the core experience. Also this wouldn't turn substack into medium, as the core issue with medium was the membership was site-wide, whereas substack is writer-level.
They have a paid ratio of around 6% (around 35M subscribers, 2M paid.) Some correlating of past subscription and revenue figures suggests each subscribed user nets Substack $11 revenue. So perhaps 130 million total subscriptions to hit 100M revenue.
If that's compared to a mediocre social network like Twitter, which supposedly can show ~$45/year/user of ads, if Substack can get a quarter of its non-paid subscribers to view ads that are a quarter as effective (smaller economies of scale, weak ad partner etc.), they would still quadruple their total top line revenue.
And it's all upside from there because they can get better at selling ads at scale and they can grow unpaid followers by diluting their brand once they're confident it'll pay off.
That, unfortunately, explains the VC case to me. I'd much rather them be a smaller company that focuses on taking real money.
Why is selling ads unfortunate? The newspaper industry was ad-sustained for a century. Credible journalism only persists in a handful of newspapers, because only they can be subscription supported, the rest depended on ad-revenue that got dominated by google and meta, which meant gutting the journalism quality.
The problem with google ads, is google gets all the cut. If substack can produce an ad system, where the writer can take a bigger cut and exercise control (or choose not to), then it returns the ad-revenue to the writer, which'll make the space boom.
Youtube is half-ad revenue, and it clearly sustains a large ecosystem of thriving video creators. Why can't substack do the same.
The ads can take two forms.
1. Generic ads, which substack just providess silently, and takes a large cut.
2. Writer-sponsored ads. Essentially like youtube sponsorship segments. Except substack provides a nice interface to put the ads (That doesn't piss off the users), and a centralized payment/bidding platform to lower the transaction friction, and take a small cut out of it.
Selling ads per se is fine, but in Substack's case it would detract from their focus on helping writers be good enough to sell subscriptions. I think that is special. Helping writers be good enough to draw the attention of free users has affected the writing the users produce at other platforms/publications.
I actually believe Substack is sincere when they said this week that the free following product is in service of driving subscriptions, when if/when revenue from free users is introduced, that's going to change no matter how hard they try to protect the original mission.
Why would they need at least $100m revenue? Why would 50 not be enough? Why is it not enough for a service to be simply profitable? Why would every service need to shoot for the moon? This would be true for every company, but hell, we are talking here about a plaintext blogging site.
The most successful use pf generative AI is a chatbot… once you can use a model with natural language you need less rich UIs. I think UIs will become simpler and value will be in the proprietary data you can manage to grab to adapt existing models to some valuable use cases.
chat is the new ui..imagine going to a bank website and you just enter in the chat - I need to view transactions and pause my debit card. It may then create an action list, and take you to the two links in order, without needing to find a button, or link. That saves a lot of time... In the future with AGI/SGI, though... well -- AI can be the entire app... you want a tax software with the look/feel of quickbooks or same exact functionality no problem... you want a 3d ai avatar that has all those things but interacts via speech, just ask for it... you want a VR version of the original 8bit legend of zelda - just ask.
Any software will just be created without any care for frameworks, platform, hosting, etc... it'll be hosted in the 'brain' of the ai.
Not a direct answer, but I am targeting data marts from ERPs and other Enterprise applications like CRMs. I think data marts (data warehouses) are very valuable but they are too expensive and hard to build, so an AI that could generate the sql for the marts directly from the apps could be very valuable. What do you think?
I find the “principled software” part a bit hard to believe, considering bootstrapped companies change owners too, but the editing files part is interesting. In tina cms [1] they have “visual editing”, which is the concept of editing stuff visually but pushing boring markdown/text files to github. Visual editing is an interesting way to avoid vendor lock-in but still provide a UI based way of doing things with text files.
