Sunday, February 18, 2018

Quick thoughts about Blogger and Medium. Plus: The 2018 SaaS Funding Napkin!

I usually use this blog when I write new posts. Occasionally I re-publish selected posts on our Medium channel. Lately, however, I've observed myself publishing on Medium first, for the simple reason that the authoring experience is much better on Medium than on Blogger, especially when you're including a lot of pictures. 

What can we learn from this?
  1. You can lure users away from an old product by offering a much better UX. A bit better isn't enough to get over inertia and to offset switching costs. It has to be 10x better and cheaper, like Sarah Tavel said. (When I say "10x better" I don't mean it literally but figuratively because in most cases I don't know how the superiority of one user experience over another can be measured quantitatively.)
  2. If the incumbent benefits from network effects, it's much more difficult. A complete migration from Blogger to Medium would be very painful for me because like you, most of my readers are here – and many of you are reading the blog using an RSS subscription or an email subscription, or you've bookmarked www.theangelvc.net, all of which would cause friction if I decided to migrate.
  3. At some point I have to switch to a blogging platform that has not been built in the last millennium. :-) My current thinking is to switch to a hosted Wordpress provider, use a minimalistic Medium-like template, and find a solution that doesn't require readers to switch their RSS/email subscriptions. Let me know if you have any thoughts. :)
Anyway, the actual reason for this post is that I've just published a series of blog posts, along with the 2018 version of the SaaS Funding Napkin, on Medium, and I wanted to make sure that you don't miss it. 

Here you go:


You can also check out the napkin on Product Hunt, and if you're interested in the physical, real version of the napkin, fill out this short Typeform!