If you’re a developer you probably know the story better than I.
Experts Exchange was the go-to platform for coding enthusiasts to clarify their doubts. EE would put user behind a paywall just after you’d your question. You could read other questions too, but all answers had to be paid for. This was too frustrating for developers who wanted quick solutions and didn’t always want to pay for it.
Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood founded Stackoverflow to bring a new approach. They realised that for every question, thousands wanted the answers, and they gave it to them for free. There was no paywall. They instead enabled upvoting and down voting for questions and answers.
This way, those who were the most upvoted were given increasing community management control. Many were encouraged to contribute answers too. Stackoverflow became a thriving developer community that helped developers save time and effort. It also became a passion project for a lot of developers finding answers for others from across the world.
How did they monetise? They’d built a community of the world’s geekiest developers and THEY are ALWAYS in demand. He put up job ads and enabled career discussion and helped developers showcase their contributions as an authentic presentation of their credibility. He was clear that was the only way to run Stackoverflow.
Then…. He got funded. VCs obviously don’t have the same patience. Despite healthy returns, they wanted greater ROI.
The founders wouldn’t relent. After a lot of acrimony, Stackoverflow was sold to Prosus a consumer internet conglomerate for $1.8Bn.
The new owners did the most innovative strategic manoeuvre by any tech company in the world.
They brought in an Indian CEO PrashanthChandrashekhar!
The new CEO, in his bid to monetise the ‘assets’ of Stackoverflow, promptly cut down the core things that made the company attractive to developers. Last week they announced that they are shutting down Stackoverflow jobs, which was the original revenue generator for the site.
The downvotes it’s received is enough proof that Stackoverflow is now on a suicidal mission, going against the wishes of the very developers who gave them traction. It’s only a matter of time before it is broken up and sold to degenerates into just another has been.
This is just another case where a successful business losing its way because they forgot their ‘why’.
The purpose is the anchor to any business and without a purpose, the business is rudderless and really has nowhere to go.
This is also a lesson in who to raise money from. I’d said this before. We’ve all seen this before. There are investors and there are INVESTORS.
Entrepreneurs need to be very wary of who they raise funds from.
One bad investor can ruin the whole pool of them and bring any business crashing down no matter how big.
