The plan for Obsidian is to never grow beyond 10-12 people, never take VC funding, never collect personal data or analytics.
Continue building with the assumption that software is ephemeral, files matter more than apps. Use formats that are open and durable.
See our manifesto:
https://obsidian.md/about
From a traditional business perspective the Obsidian approach has many downsides:
we can only focus on 1-2 things at a time, we can't build lots of stuff in parallel like a bigger company can
we have to cover our costs, we can't subsidize pricing — charging a fair price is a disadvantage in the market
we have no lock-in, our users can leave at any time easily
we have less freedom to build fancy features that rely on unencrypted private data (like cloud-based AI) or more sophisticated non-portable data formats
we have limited metrics to inform product decisions, we have to learn directly from what users say
users have the freedom to significantly modify the app via plugins, more things can go wrong or feel less cohesive
... I would not recommend this approach to every business, but these are the tradeoffs we choose knowingly.
kepano
ToddZ Ⓥ