Comment by unclebucknasty

>Enter market, disrupt, get fat and lazy, raise prices, drop quality

Exactly this. But, it's funny how a brand's image sticks. I selected Zendesk for a business I ran years ago. And it was the slow-boiling frog experience, where it takes time to ultimately realize the rift between where you started and where you are. But we hobbled along due mainly to switching friction.

Still, I instinctively reached for them when evaluating support solutions recently, based on name and familiarity alone. But, with fresh eyes, it was immediately obvious that they were a complete nonstarter.

MailChimp's the same. They may not have ever been the lowest-priced solution, but time was they made it easy to get started and the value was there for a startup/small-biz. Now, they're trying to be quasi-enterprise with an over-priced bloated feature set.

These guys start disrupting by aiming for simplicity in a value-priced, pro-small customer offering. Then, in the pursuit of endless growth, they raise prices and become staunchly anti-customer in favor of their own economic objectives.

Would be nice to see companies continue to maintain their disposition to original customers and ethos, but pursue growth through new options that are truly optional and not subsidized by the entire user base. That, and adding new, complementary product lines that still retain that original ethos.