Prosumers Skew Expectations

Well, it keeps on happening. The Browser Company, the entity behind the innovative browser Arc, announced that they are “slowing down” the development of their flagship browser, and redirecting their team towards something completely new designed for mainstream users as opposed to Arc’s power user focus. Most interpret this to mean that the browser is being put into maintenance mode; hopefully, there’ll still be security patches and stability fixes, but new features will be few and far between.

The cynical will point out that the company took over $100mm in venture capital up to this point, and there’s just no way to live up to any implied valuation of the company selling piecemeal subscriptions to AI-enabled features. But even without the VC infusion, software business models are in a particularly tough spot right now. Case in point, Omnivore—a read-later app that I’ve really enjoyed using this past year—also announced that they’ll no longer continue development and in fact will shut down completely by the end of November, despite the project being completely self- and donation-funded. Simple survival seems to depend on overcoming sub-mainstream scale, at least for consumer products.

For both Omnivore and the Arc browser, they focused their efforts on probably the worst customer segment, that of the “prosumer.” Here, I’m using the professional + consumer portmanteau; essentially, customers have some of the expectations of professionals of that category, but are closer to consumers in purchasing patterns. Arc, in particular, kept on adding power user features that the developers admitted, in retrospect, that they could not get less dedicated browser users to even understand their utility.

It’s not entirely The Browser Company’s fault, though, for believing that this business strategy could work. Multiple trends in software development have repeated a similar theme. For instance, the idea of product-led growth is to prioritize the experience of the end users, and then layering various freemium business models to eventually convert users into paying subscribers. Coming from the other side, bring your own device policies and setups have further mixed the surface areas between traditional enterprise software and consumer computing.

Prosumers occupy this uncomfortable middle where some of the features approach that of professional usage—think ProRAW image formats in iPhones, or robust plugin support for text editors—but the users who value these additions cannot pay enterprise-grade licenses to fund their development costs1. Worse, prosumers add a real and usually disproportionate support burden, just because they’re also fans and passionate about their chosen products.

That is not to say that the prosumer is dying, or that the consumerization of enterprise software has run its course. As someone who fits this description of wanting pro-level features for consumer products, I’d be sad if our user segment gets gradually deprioritized and forgotten. Rather, prosumers feel like they’re unsustainable as an initial, core audience. As many founders and early users are precisely this prosumer profile, it’s a natural starting point for product development; yet, it’d be prudent to intentionally evolve the strategy, to quickly drive towards either mass consumer adoption or enterprise support. The ol’ startup adage of solving your own problem presents a discrete problem statement, but with an expiry date—one that I suspect comes earlier than most companies would like.


  1. And not only in terms of pure contract size; enterprise deals often run multiple years, which provides the company steady and predictable income.

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