Comment by MeetingsBrowser
4 days ago
Not many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding.
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
4 days ago
Not many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding.
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Cursor costs $240 per year and loads of people are paying for it
I doubt there is much overlap between people happily paying for cursor and people upset Zed took VC funding.