@mattrogowski hit the nail on the head.. and @Lukas W. (Ninja'd while I wrote this)
Back before I joined Audentio (just a couple weeks away from 2 years on the team!), I worked for media groups and freelance (among other things, but those aren't relevant to the conversation here).
When I was freelance, I was able to be pretty nimble with small client work, and could hop around on a variety of small things with minimal investment (my biggest source of income early in my career was selling HTML boilerplates, back around the time CSS was just becoming a "thing"). I could do the little one-off projects like a template, design or extension for something, and it'd be no big deal, because I kept a small client base and didn't have to offer much support unless they paid for extra for it.
The media group gigs had more agency-style feel, but focusing on small business (as part of an upsell for advertising). We'd occasionally take larger clients which had more real dev needs outside our standard offering, but for the most part we just had a simple process for cranking out little websites and the like. Taking on larger projects wasn't always feasible just because I was almost always the sole developer (I typically filled the role of full stack in the media group setting, with the rest of the team being designers who did mockups or worked with drag & drop builders). We tried to build relationships with larger agencies to pass the bigger stuff on if my plate was full, and sometimes that worked.
Growing the work with both small and larger clients we wanted at a media company just wasn't feasible, however. With our team, we couldn't have it both ways, no matter how much we tried. We could either focus on what launched us as small clients, or focus on larger clients. The team wasn't big enough to do both, and the last one I worked for ended up downsizing spectacularly because it tried to do both and failed (and, eventually, the entire company sold). If we hadn't tried to do both, we might've succeeded.
Audentio is just making a transition from one business focus to another, and unfortunately, it's never going to be a simple process for everybody. I've actually been really impressed at how it has been handled; with over 20 years in the web dev industry, I've seen a LOT of people try this and fail.
I can absolutely guarantee there is no way we could make this transition without some customers being affected, but with our extension of support and open-sourcing of a LOT of products (not to mention making others free), I can't imagine a better way of handling it that benefits the most people without causing too much headache for our team here.
Back before I joined Audentio (just a couple weeks away from 2 years on the team!), I worked for media groups and freelance (among other things, but those aren't relevant to the conversation here).
When I was freelance, I was able to be pretty nimble with small client work, and could hop around on a variety of small things with minimal investment (my biggest source of income early in my career was selling HTML boilerplates, back around the time CSS was just becoming a "thing"). I could do the little one-off projects like a template, design or extension for something, and it'd be no big deal, because I kept a small client base and didn't have to offer much support unless they paid for extra for it.
The media group gigs had more agency-style feel, but focusing on small business (as part of an upsell for advertising). We'd occasionally take larger clients which had more real dev needs outside our standard offering, but for the most part we just had a simple process for cranking out little websites and the like. Taking on larger projects wasn't always feasible just because I was almost always the sole developer (I typically filled the role of full stack in the media group setting, with the rest of the team being designers who did mockups or worked with drag & drop builders). We tried to build relationships with larger agencies to pass the bigger stuff on if my plate was full, and sometimes that worked.
Growing the work with both small and larger clients we wanted at a media company just wasn't feasible, however. With our team, we couldn't have it both ways, no matter how much we tried. We could either focus on what launched us as small clients, or focus on larger clients. The team wasn't big enough to do both, and the last one I worked for ended up downsizing spectacularly because it tried to do both and failed (and, eventually, the entire company sold). If we hadn't tried to do both, we might've succeeded.
Audentio is just making a transition from one business focus to another, and unfortunately, it's never going to be a simple process for everybody. I've actually been really impressed at how it has been handled; with over 20 years in the web dev industry, I've seen a LOT of people try this and fail.
I can absolutely guarantee there is no way we could make this transition without some customers being affected, but with our extension of support and open-sourcing of a LOT of products (not to mention making others free), I can't imagine a better way of handling it that benefits the most people without causing too much headache for our team here.
Analogies and all aside and assuming it was all exactly the same, I personally wouldn't call a market that can sustain a handful or a few dozen freelancers a viable market.
