I'm a scrappy startup and I care about all our customers' usecases

I was a big fan of the original Chromecast. The UX was simple: install the thing, get it on your Wifi, and then just send stuff to it from your phone. The end. No remote. No account. Barely even any security! It didn’t do anything other than be a destination for whatever content I want to see on my TV.

I recently bought whatever Google is calling the latest generation of Chromecast and it involves a whole account setup, it has a remote, collects a bunch of data about me (which it probably can get based on what I cast and my IP anyways), and, basically, it’s just a TV. It’s still an HDMI dongle, but it’s basically a TV. I hated every second of it.

I get it. Not everyone just wants to use their phone to send content. Some part of the market Google wants to get into are more used to the TV UX, so Google is providing it.

The approach they’ve taken is just to force users into this account flow. In doing that, they’ve left users like myself, who genuinely find the account-less flow superior, without an option. It’s not just Chromecast that is like this, the big tech companies tend to force whatever workflow they want on us. AI features is the latest and most obvious. Pretty much every big tech product I’ve used lately is trying to force an AI feature on me. Even WhatsApp, the entire point of WhatsApp being private communication, has some AI functionality that I do not want and cannot get rid of. Or Gmail has been adding some auto-complete functionality that is non-obvious how to turn off. I used to be a big Mac OS X user because it provided both a novice-friendly interface but let advanced users be advanced users, it’s just a Unix underneath, but left because Apple became, IMO, more and more hostile towards advanced users.

While I was, begrudgingly, setting up this new Chromecast, I had a lot of time while waiting for it to setup to ruminate on how big the gap is in user empathy between Google and the company I co-founded, Terrateam.

We care about every one of our user’s usecases.

We worked hard to build an architecture that has very few opinions so we can support as many use cases as our users can muster. When a user comes to us with a new use case that isn’t supported, we almost always implement it as long as it fits into the model that Terrateam provides.

Part of that is just how we view software: it should be capable and flexible. Like the Unix Philosophy, where each tool should solve a specific problem and compose with other tools, we think features in a platform should be similar. Our features generally provide orthogonal functionality and can be configured to work in unison to provide a more powerful solution. For most of Terrateam’s life I have been the sole developer, and we are punching way above our weight because our product is so flexible. That flexibility was driven, in large part, by empathy for our users. Rather than force them to conform to us, we want them to retain their existing workflows. We don’t even believe in vendor lock-in, our product is ridiculously easy to leave if you don’t like it.

The other part of this is simply that we’re a scrappy startup. That isn’t to say that we are struggling. We are bootstrapped. We’ve built all of this with sweat instead of funding. We do not have the marketing budget to convince people to use us. We don’t have the budget to hire an army of sales folks.

What’s more, we don’t even want to have the power to lose user empathy and still succeed. I know you can’t get to be a big tech company without dropping "Don’t be evil" from your charter, so maybe it’s better if getting so large were not possible? I know that’s not going to happen but that doesn’t mean everyone has to have big tech envy. Except for the huge revenue, constant media coverage, and large yachts, there isn’t much there.

Being a scrappy startup is fine. We’re hitting our own internal definitions of success. Our company is sustainable. And, most importantly, our customers give us really positive feedback.