Hi Charles.
I’m Ivan, the founder.
That’s a fair question. Before investing your time, you deserve to know our plans with all honesty. “Free” is not the answer.
I’ll show what forces companies to betray and exploit their users, then show where we are and share our plans.
Meantime, I’ll challenge myself to write an even longer post than yours!
Cause
I agree with you about the cause of evil acquisitions resulting in:
- product killings
- predatory pricing
- exploitative techniques such as a closed ecosystem.
VC
VC infrastructure pushes companies like Figma toward rapid growth. They have to:
- Burn through capital and give away equity
- Exit.
Wasteful architecture
Obviously, web apps need servers. Besides that, Figma:
- Hosts on Amazon AWS. As you know, any cloud provider is nothing more than hardware + price markup.
- Has a heavy document structure
- Stores everything in the cloud. Users are encouraged to store the documents in the cloud, not locally.
A Ponzi scheme?
I don’t know how it is, but from our perspective, the AWS bills must be outrageous. It’s a Ponzi scheme of data storage.
- To keep paying AWS storage bills, they have to recruit new users.
- For that, they have to grow.
- For that, they need venture capital.
- Venture capital needs an exit.
What do we do differently?
We didn’t raise, to start with. Call us old-fashioned, but Icons8 began as a design agency and financed its MVP with service work.
After selling icons, we invested profits into our following products. We find it relaxing to think about the bottom line, not valuation. We think about product value rather than traction.
We don’t have any exit strategy. I wrote the will when I had COVID; call it my exit strategy.
What if they offer you 20B?
I think nobody offers anything comparable for Icons8 ever. But, here’s what I know for sure.
- I was offered multiple times to sell Icons8. We always had a pleasant conversation, but it never came to ask about the price. Not a single time I’ve asked or called a valuation.
- I’ve got dozens of calls from VCs. I respect their time and warn them that we’re not raising, but I’d love to chat. We had a friendly conversation each time but never discussed a round.
- Icons8 has been profitable each year since 2012.
How can we live without hundreds of millions of external financing? By being c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ brutally frugal.
Lean infrastructure
It’s a desktop app, so users download it from the app stores and execute it on their laptops—no server bills.
- Lunacy works with offline files. We just introduced cloud in the latest versions, and it’s frugal too.
- Our cloud is super optimized regarding the amount of data stored and the servers we use for storage.
- We store super lean incremental changes
- Instead of Amazon S3, we use modest VPS’ + cheap backups for that.
Does it hurt performance? Quite contrary. We have multiple nodes close to your location, even in Africa. And because we transfer less data, performance is even better.
Small team
We’re still a small team that moves fast. The core Lunacy team is 11 people. We also share support, marketing, and finance with the rest of Icons8.
Saying that we’re not burning through cash fast. However, we need to earn something to sustain ourselves. Here’s how.
How Lunacy earns
- Lunacy earns by selling the assets from the left pane.
- We charge for upscaling the images.
We need more than that for our sustainability, however. At least, not until our user base grows 50x.
- We’ve introduced our cloud plans in a recent version. Our team users pay for unlimited cloud documents.
- We don’t plan to charge individual users.
- Neither do we plan to monetize offline use.
Why should you believe me?
- As I showed, we’re in no rush to get money
- Also, we have modest expenses
- We finance ourselves
- We have no pressure from investors
- We have a track record of refusing buyouts
Finally, we have a track record of generously freemium products. The whole Icons8 is freemium. Here’s Icons8’s business model.