Not seeking growth is a perfectly valid strategy

The other day, I ran into a Mastodon discussion about open source software and how blaming your userbase isn't a great strategy for growth.

Scott Jenson made a comment (emphasis mine):

I like this post from Ian Coldwater. Slagging off users isn't a growth strategy. Now, you may not want growth, perfectly fine, but this is specifically calling out apps that want mainstream consumers

and what sparked me to write this blog post was this comment by Drew Mochak:

"I don't want growth" is such a wacky, fediverse-only take

I'm not sure I agree with the "fediverse-only" jab but given that it would be true, that would make me much happier about being part of Fediverse because not wanting growth is a perfectly valid strategy and I want to tell you why.

In another reply down the thread he said this (emphasis mine):

I find it really strange to pre-suppose that a thing will only appeal to a certain group and to not see this as a failure mode. The truth is no one knows how people will react to anything put out into the world. "you're the wrong audience for my tool" just feels like elitism dressed up as incompetence, frankly. If someone wants to act like a hermet, that's their right, but I also won't take their opinions very seriously.

Focusing on your target userbase is a complete opposite of a "failure mode". It's what more projects should aim for. It's perfectly valid — and beneficial to both your project and the users you are targeting — to say "hey, I'm building this with this particular audience in mind and I won't be expanding it to meet your needs".

I'm not opposed to seeking growth (although I am vehemently opposed to the capitalistic desire for always growing growth or growth at any expense). Seeing the world through the lenses of only growth being a good target is depressingly capitalist.

Since the original post he replied to was about open source projects, I'm looking at this both from a personal/hobby project's and a commercial project's perspective.

Home-cooked, situational software is a great example of a category of software that thrives without growth. In that blog post, I quote Clay Shirky:

The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web applications is that it becomes easy to build applications to be used by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design practice. Making form-fit software for a small group of users has typically been the province of banks and research labs -- because of the costs involved, Web School applications have concentrated on getting large-scale audiences. And by privileging the value that comes with scale, Web School applications put other kinds of value, particularly social value, out of reach. - Clay Shirky / https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html

I have built so many projects where the user count is single digits. Often just me, sometimes me and a small community that benefits from it. I don't desire any more users because more users means more maintenance, more bug reports, more expectations and more responsibilities.

In a case of open source or hobby project, that usually doesn't translate to money and definitely not in any scale that would make it possible to spend less time at work to have more time for the hobby project.

In terms of commercial software, there are many use cases where building a service or a software that serves a small team of say 10 people is the best approach. Trying to morph it into something that can be opened to larger audiences usually just adds more overhead than it brings benefits.

If we focus on Drew's second comment about "pre-supposing appeal to a certain group", I hear an argument about focus. Sure, if someone from outside the original target group finds your software, uses it and doesn't complain, you don't have to chase them away. But sometimes it is a good choice if you worry that growth will distract your focus or spread your workload too much.

Looking at so many software project these days, there seems to be a massive problem with loss of focus. At the massive scale — like Google or Meta —, it can probably work but for any smaller scale business definitely needs to focus on serving the niche audience they are building for instead of aiming to please everyone.

Too much growth, especially too early can become a death trap for new businesses. Every time you chase someone new, you're spending less time learning from your current customers and serving their needs