Make Money to Make More Websites

I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber.

They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of a personal website where you publish your stuff to that of a chef/restaurant, but that’s a separate post).

Around ~1:13:00, Gruber quotes Walt Disney who said, “We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” And he goes on to argue that when you’re forced to choose one of these priorities over the other — because you will undoubtedly face decisions where the two sets of values come into direct opposition — the company that prioritizes making movies over making money is fundamentally a different company than the one that chooses making money over making movies.

If you ultimately prioritize making money, then what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is you make a lot of money (for shareholders, for owners, for yourself, for whomever).

Conversely, if you ultimately prioritize making movies, than what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is your movies. Hopefully that makes you a lot of money, but it might not. One day people might say, “Damn, they made great movies. Too bad they’re not around anymore.”

To be fair, the prioritization of those values shifts and changes over time. Sometimes companies prioritize one over the other based on circumstances, e.g. “We’re gonna go bankrupt soon, we have to prioritize making money in these particular areas or we won’t be around long enough to keep making money.”

I’m not saying there’s an easy answer in those situations, I just find the opposition of those priorities intriguing. Ultimately, you do have to choose something over something else. It’s not necessarily a one-time decision, but the outcomes are a function of that prioritization over time.

Gruber believes Apple still generally prioritizes users most, i.e. in most cases, most of the time:

I think it’s true that the second priority for [Apple] is to make as much money as possible, but it’s the second priority. Every time [that] priority kinda creeps ahead , like the way they’ve shepherded the App Store and the commissions they make from it, is arguably an area where they’re driven more by, “Let’s make as much money as possible because we control the App Store.” Rather than, “Let’s make the App Store as good for users and developers as possible.” And I think that’s the reason we complain about it, of all the things Apple makes [the reason people who enjoy the company’s products still complain the most about] that area of the company is because the priorities are clearly in the other order.

It does feel like so much of tech today is people asking, “What can we make for others that’ll make us a lot of money?”

But that’s a different prioritization than, “Let’s make something great for ourselves and, along the way, let’s see if we can make some money in order to keep doing what we love.”

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