Comment by vessenes

All points well taken for sure. I especially like 'too small to trigger anyone' as an appealing defensive strategy. But I'm not sure you're too small to matter, even now. Hopefully that's received as good news :)

As a thought experiment, I just googled up small Italian tech companies that are publicly traded, and found, for example, DHH - an Italian hosting and content services company trading on Borsa Italiana (Growth I presume, it's a very small company) - earnings of 3.7m euros right now on a slow growing ~30m+ in revenue, market cap of 110m or so as far as I can tell. Were they to add 3.5m in net income to their company, their market cap would likely push to 150+m -- they'd have doubled their earnings. So, it might be worth 50+mm to them (or quite possibly a lot more if they could pair that with some growth and more exploitative margins) to pick this niche up.

To be clear, I wasn't pushing you toward a hyper growth strategy; it wouldn't suit you, and I think the CMS market probably isn't suitable in any event, even if you wanted to.

But, maybe a way to think of it is this, while there is risk in any strategy, it's worth minimizing the risks of any chosen strategy as part of your responsibility to your stakeholders (employees, family, shareholders, customers, self -- choose your preferred order).

In this case, if I were on your board, knowing the infinitely small amount I do about you guys, I'd probably suggest you at least have a structured growth plan in place -- that is, have growth targets, understand how to drive them, and assess success as you go. Nothing about that implies accidental enshittification or cultural rot; just managing this aspect of your business as well. If you haven't been doing that so far, when/if you need these skills, you'll be glad you have them. In the interim exercising them gets you more control of your destiny, whether that's aimed at getting everybody more time off for things that matter or cash or hitting the next 'stable' size of organization -- it's more that the tool is a useful one to develop.

As far as deciding what to do - always the founder's curse/blessing! I'm on the side of developing as much of a toolbox as possible, it just adds optionality. Keep it up!