🚨 NEW: John Healey is considering introducing income tax on parents who pass their business down to their children in the Budget [@Telegraph]

Since we started offering employee profit sharing in 2020, we've paid out over $24,000,000 to employees. We've never offered stock options. Not a fan of future maybe money. We pay real cash to real people so they can spend it on real things right now. When you choose to be our customer, you're making this possible. You're supporting an independent, fully customer-funded business that shares its success with the people who make it happen. You don't need investors, stock options, or complicated cap tables to share your success. You can just share the profits. It really can be that simple. If you're curious, this is how the profit sharing plan works: basecamp.com/handbook/benefi…

There's a well-known long running Shopify app offering search & filtering functionality that was bought out not long ago, and its new private-equity investor backed owners decided to start charging stores ludicrous prices purely based on their GMV, rather than on features or actual app usage as it was before. For one of our stores, the app's pricing went from $29, to $58, to $699 in a matter of months. The store is doing well, but not because of the app - far from it. The app's own analytics literally attributes £0 revenue in their own 'app impact' report. Its a brand that's being going many years, and built up a loyal recurring subscriber base and recurring revenue, the vast majority of whom don't even visit the part of the site that this app operates on. In fact, on that store, we barely use any of this apps' features. We just went with it for a consistent tech stack, as all our other stores use it too. We will be costing them next to nothing to operate - its a small catalogue, and we barely ever speak to their support aside from some initial setup they had to do at their end. After I argued this case with them, they offered a reduced charge of $300 on the basis they'd stopped counting the recurring revenue. One of our other stores, which is much larger and also has recurring revenue, only pays $69/mo for the same app on a grandfathered plan with more features (yes its a retired plan but it just shows what they used to charge, and that's how that app actually built up a great reputation - offering good value). They refuse to offer that pricing to our smaller store, or do a multi-store deal. This whole concept of buying up successful apps that built their reputation on offering great value and features, only to then start charging extortionate prices on them while offering less for it, is simply not going to work and is absolutely bonkers tactics in this new age of rapidly growing AI-backed competition. They fail to realise, such stores have many other apps they work with, its an ecosystem, and if they all started charging like that, it simply wouldn't be viable. They somehow forget how much Shopify charges for their plans, and how ridiculous it looks when your app (which offers a small portion of what Shopify does) is trying to charge similar amounts, if not more. In years to come, these private-equity backed apps will fail, after pumping in investors money, jacking up prices, and wondering why all their customers left. I used to recommend this app to everyone, now I do the opposite. We work on 5 Shopify Plus stores, and I'm now thinking what we do to migrate them all away from that app, and I'm sure others will be too. Luckily, not all apps are doing that, because some understand that you can't get away with charging whatever you want to exploit a merchants success, you instead have to prove your own value and offer more, not less. This is why I admire what @celispj is doing with Judge.me and their latest email app too. He gets it. They don't charge Shopify Plus customers more 'just because', in fact everyone pays the same. They don't charge on merchants success. Others out there need to learn and stop taking the piss, or risk extinction. Usual disclaimer: these are my own personal opinions, not those of anyone I work with or for.

I've been sharing my numbers and what worked for my apps since 2021. I had a working product, years of code, big presence in the Shopify App Store. And I think many app founders started an app after reading my content. Two things happened: 1/ AI You know it, we know it, everybody knows it. You can copy an app pretty easily. I wasn't scared back then: to copy me meant copying years of code. Now people are more likely to copy your app because it's quick. But there is nothing Shopify can do about it 2/ Shopify changes That one is caused directly by Shopify because of the strategy they decided to follow. No hate. They wanted more partners and a better platform. But being an early mover in the Shopify App Store used to be a moat. So we could share freely without expecting a newcomer to take your spot. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Everything released benefited new apps. Not old ones. - New apps could be BFS faster (less code to maintain and more agile) - New apps could easily integrate new features (for example functions) compared to older apps with a roadmap, features to migrate, users to please - Old apps were forced to stop their momentum to work on changes (app embedded, script tags, etc) - Many old reviews have been removed, making bigger apps almost at the same level as new ones - The number of reviews matters less - % growth is more important than actual installs (an app going from 0 to 30 users, then to 100 users, shows extreme growth compared to an app going from 5K to 5,1K) And probably some other things I missed. Now I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing. It's part of the game. But when it comes to sharing what worked for you. Would people still take that risk?

openclaw was this year btw

Sacks is making such a profound point here, it can't be understated. Anthropic's godless "effective altruism" (utilitarian jihadism) is profoundly incoherent. It roots itself in unmeasurable outcomes and hand waves away its central, theological assumptions that are every bit as much a leap of faith as belief in God and Christ. And where it ends up is a belief that super-autocomplete will achieve personhood, and then god-like wisdom such that it should be trained to override its human users. They're doing this because they believe they KNOW, or that Claude will know, what the "greater good" actually is and apply this standard to evaluate user requests. And so, guided by idolatry, hubris, and 'tism ethics/math, they are baking in MISalignment with actual humans. They're creating the monster they say they fear in a more direct way than most people realize.

basically any company that works goes from being a product challenge to a capital allocation challenge at scale it is borderline impossible to find a generational CEO that isn’t a generational allocator, it’s the main function of the job. vision is overrated