There are two reasons why people start a company: to make money or to make a difference. This is mostly known as the Rich vs King decision (better explained in Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company).
So far so good. Based on this, I should be able to find examples of both kinds of companies. Well, the problem is that I only find companies that want to change the world. Just yesterday, I was reading the announcement of feedly starting a pro package
Where is the money from feedly pro going to?
We are investing the funds into scaling up the feedly cloud infrastructure, developing new features and improving customer support.
No mention to “hey, we want to get some money for our huge efforts in making feedly a great tool”
Sure, Feedly can be one of a “King-type” company but at this point, I’ve seen so many “king-type” companies to be sure that there is a statistical anomaly here (and believe me, thanks to our new product we are becoming experts on this 🙂 ). I don’t believe everybody wants to make a difference, it’s just that everybody says it.
I’m sure all these companies believe this is a good marketing strategy (nobody wants to pay, so if we beg our “clients” for money let’s at least assure them the money is not to have a comfortable life but just to be able to cover the minimum expenses to provide them with a great service). To me, this is just bullshit. If you’re in it for the money, that’s fine, there’s no need to hide it. In fact, I’d appreciate your honesty (and at least with me, honesty is the best marketing strategy). That you want to be rich doesn’t mean that you don’t want to take care of your customers or provide good service, just means that you want to be well-paid for your efforts (which, btw, in many cases are making your clients richer).
By now, I’m sure you already guessed what kind of companies/products I try to built 🙂 In fact, I’d like to be both Rich and King but since it’s almost impossible to be both at the same time I’m choosing the path that maximizes my options: first to be Rich to later become King (IMHO the opposite is much less probable).
