So you could avoid controversy at all cost, let others define who you are as a company, or you could embrace the controversy and state your positions and benefit from the increased awareness of your products. Despite the loud proclamations of "I will never buy/use/recommend GitKraken" we have had record sales since this and other threads about this have come out. If you're a founder, should you do this or should you follow the age-old PR wisdom of avoiding confrontation with users? The fact is, explaining the how and why and defending your reputation against false claims is generally a good thing. I'm super appreciative of those comments and it has already lead to improvements on our website and product direction. Looking past the noise, you can find some great discussion in this thread, including valid critique of the product and our website. Some saw my blunt responses as having a lack of understanding of PR. The biggest point of disagreement from the people who resorted to name calling and bashing me personally is their absolute insistence that we shouldn't charge what we charge for GitKraken. It turns out more people are exposed to the product as a result, and many love what they see and love the fact that GitKraken is moving towards a bright and sustainable future.īe prepared for some people to call you "childish" and an "asshole" for calling their arguments ridiculous and providing reasons why. This type of blunt, to the point, no-nonsense responses generates a lot of attention. So after ~50 comments, here are some interesting take-aways for other founders: Go ahead, let me have it! I'll try to respond to most comments/questions. My amazement is how software engineers, who themselves make a living building software, could expect other software engineers to work for free! It takes a huge team of amazing software engineers, designers and marketers to make a product like GitKraken. How dare we charge so much when software developers' time is nearly worthless? I know, I know.Imagine our audacity to ask commercial users to pay for a product that has cost us millions of dollars of development effort. Open source projects? use it for free! Educational projects? use it for free! Doing cool non-profit work? use it for free! A small startup that hasn't made money yet? USE IT FOR FREE!īut if you are using GitKraken for commercial purposes, where using GitKraken is helping you be more productive (which in effect makes you or your company money), then we are asking that you pay for the product. Normally, we ignore these comments, but today I wanted to respond to some of these ridiculous views.įirst off, GitKraken continues to be free if you are using it for any purpose, other than making money. Some are calling us dishonest and turning relatively hostile on the product. Saying they would never pay for a Git client or that we did a bait and switch on them. This has been met mostly with enthusiasm from users who appreciate paying for a tool that saves them an average of 60 hours per year!Ī small minority are freaking out. In the past few months, as GitKraken has matured to be a truly awesome Git client, we have started implementing our monetization plan to make GitKraken sustainable as a long-term product.
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