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Hello.
My name is Steve Rodrigue. I'm a software developer from the south shore of Montreal and I've been programming web applications commercially for the last 12 years. Over those years, I've occupied different roles, including: software developer, team leader, software architect and IT director. It would have been easy for me to work in a corporate environment. However, I chose a different path; I decided to start my own company because I believe there is a problem in software development and I want to fix it. I believe that inequality will increase in America if we continue to use and develop technology like we currently do.
What is the problem?
In the past 30 years, technology evolved greatly, specially the internet. In the beginning, the world wide web was an awesome place where everyone could create a decentralized website and publish their views and opinions. Businesses used their decentralized website to sell goods and services online. Then, they began to use online web applications to share informations with their employees and customers. Lately, they have been building their online offerings on top of third party platforms where they pay a monthly fee to use. In the past, software companies were building open source or private software that they were self-hosting on their own servers. They had to pay maintenance fees in order to assure that their software would stay updated, without any guarantee that the company doing the maintenance was doing it properly. For that reason, platforms began to be very popular among small business owners. They could simply develop their website on top of that platform without paying anyone to update and maintain it. However, they are paying a much bigger price. They are locked in.
Can you explain?
If you buy a house from a contractor and, after a few years, something breaks, you have the ability to hire anyone of your choice to do the repairs. You don't explicitly need to use that same exact contractor. If you were obligated to use his services, he would probably increase his prices and decrease the quality of his services because he would have zero competition.
This is exactly what's happening in the software industry with proprietary platforms. Small businesses are renting accesses to platforms to classify their own information and automate their own processes. Each month, they pay fees for various platforms accesses where they willingly put their private corporate information. They then hire someone to build their website property on top of those platform APIs. If something breaks in one of the platform API, they can only communicate with 1 company to fix the problem. If a platform goes out of business, their own website will break because they can't easily replace the processes that was managed by the proprietary platform. If the proprietary platform decides to increase his prices, the small business will have the choice of modifying his own website and stop using that platform, or simply accept the higher charges. Obviously, when a company invest hundreds of thousand of dollars in development, they won't want to abandon their investment, so they'll just accept the price increase and therefore, increase their own product and service prices, making their own customer pay more.
Can it be worse?
Sometimes, some proprietary platforms also decide to use your own data against you. Imagine a startup in the taxi industry that needs a map platform to show cars to customers. That map platform would be able to record all the customer's patterns in the taxi industry. That map platform would then be able to take that data and build a competitor to the taxi startup without doing any experimental research, right? Well, unfortunately, this is a true story. I'm sure I don't have to give specifics for everyone to recognize the actors in this scenario. Overall, the monthly platform expenses and the mandatory data share makes it very hard for an entrepreneur to bootstrap a competitive company, grow it and keep it competitive enough to not suffer disruption from a funded platform.
So... get funded?
You might think that entrepreneurs should focus on starting companies that gets funded by investors. They have money to build their own technical stack. They can even separate their technical stack into separate platform products and then sell them to other companies, like Amazon and Google are doing with their cloud offerings. However, to get investor's money, entrepreneurs need to build a scalable company that will make billion of dollars in revenues down the road. For this reason, they build platforms that will disrupt markets that are currently served by smaller non-funded companies, all over the globe.
Why is that a problem?
By being more advanced technologically, funded companies can increase their return on investment. Customers then buy their products and services from these funded companies because they are cheaper. As a result, small businesses go bankrupt and close shop. The funded companies can now force their distributors to decrease their prices because there is no more competition in that niche. The funded companies can then make a lot of profit and pay back its investors or keep the money in their bank account. So, the profits are no longer spent in local communities, it is taken from them and then accumulated in central places, like offshore investments, where almost no tax are paid... according to the Panama Papers. Then, founders of these big platforms begin to invest in smaller companies, which makes the wheel turn. I believe this need to stop. I believe we need to build more open source software to make businesses competitive against large platforms. That way, entrepreneurs could bootstrap companies using automation right away. They would need less staff, increase their return on investment and offer better product and services to their local community. They could communicate with other similar businesses that serve other local communities and order in bulk with them, to make the same effect as a platform buying in bulk from a distributor. Platforms would then have less free data to work with and it would be harder for them to disrupt markets that already have good prices, with good services. In such a scenario, customers are happy to pay a small price for their products and services, entrepreneurs make more money and work less and the government gets properly paid from taxes. In that scenario, the only loser is the investors that can no longer invest in a disruptive platform company and hide his profits in offshore investments. Again, according to the Panama Papers.
What is your vision?
I personally want to live in a world where local communities are strong; where everyone gets well paid without working too much. For this reason, I wanted to dedicate my company in creating open source software that specially help small entrepreneurs. I already created a lot of development tools to speed up my development process. I now need to create industry specific software to enable each industry to automate their processes and create their marketing efficiently without spending maintenance fees to update and maintain the software, while keeping their private corporate data. However, I need funding to continue my operations. Obviously, I can't rely on investors to get funded properly. So, I want to work with my customers: the small entrepreneurs. If you are an entrepreneur that share my vision, please contribute to the project. By contributing, I'll build the features your company need in the open source software we are developing. Your company will also be advertised as official sponsors. We want to build open source software that will help small entrepreneurs compete against large funded corporations that disrupt local communities.
Donations are not sustainable!
On the long run, when we'll have stable open source software built and when million of companies will use them daily, we will charge web development and web hosting companies that want to be technically trained on our open source products. Then we will promote their services on our website, encouraging local people to work with an accredited local professional. That way, we will become self-sufficient, without having to disrupt local communities to scale.
How can I help?
If you share the ideas in this video, please consider making a contribution. If you have any questions, please contact me: we can arrange a video meeting or a phone call. If you don't have any spare money to spend, that's fine: I still love you.
Cheers!
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