Curious how BTT is maintained so amazingly well (user since 2013)

[Joe.the.Monk]

@Andreas_Hegenberg I’ve used BTT since 2013. It’s indispensable, period. I’ve idly wondered over the years - have you, alone, been building and maintaining BTT? If so… my god you’re like a 1-man-army.

• BTT is complex. Must not be simple to maintain.
• It’s incredibly stable, and fixes come out in no time.
• You’re even extremely on top of this forum and people’s requests.
• AND you’re constantly pumping out features on the full spectrom from macro-level to tiny improvements (the latter which as you know are what aggregate into seamless UX experience/flow - therefore brilliant).

How do you do it?

From every angle, (project management, etc), I can’t see how one person could manage all this. Or have the mental energy to churn out what you do.

Obviously a ton of admiration over here

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

It was a lot of luck, first in 2009 I was quite lucky to find a project (BetterTouchTool) that was so much fun to work on and motivated a lot of users to try it, this allowed me to learn a lot on the side during my studies.

Then I found a great advisor for my master's thesis who allowed me to base my Master Thesis on BTT ("BetterFeedback - A Recommender System for Social Feedback to Improve Software Evolution") which allowed me to work on BTT while working on my Master's Thesis in 2014.

Then I was just lucky enough to have a job that allowed me to do BTT on the side until 2018 and then I was lucky enough to be able to make it my full time job til today!

[Joe.the.Monk]

That’s awesome, but still… so you’re really one guy doing all of this? I’ve run software teams, and I don’t understand how productive you are at execution as one person.

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

For a project like BTT with lots of isolated & opinionated functionality I think it might have often be easier being just a single person instead of a team. No coordination, no discussions, I just do what I want

[Joe.the.Monk]

Hmm. Ok. Yeah. Pretty much what I’ve wondered over the years but didn’t make sense from bayesian perspective! It works like this:

In all honesty, from a product management perspective, your execution velocity as a solo dev is beyond impressive and squarely into anomaly territory. You’re a (positive) Black Swan.

[Joe.the.Monk]

Second thing - Higher Price Tier Proposal -

I’m paying $7.50/yr for BTT.

So I depend on BTT, use it all the time, and over 13 years, I’ve given you… maybe $30-40 for it?

Request, for user’s sake, that you very reasonably make a higher priced tier with a few killer features (like the new AI feature*),* and charge more like $60/yr for it, and up the base price from $7.50/yr to ~$20/yr, with 1-year renewable licenses. That would be market-standard pricing, which you’re well below at this point. My bet is 25-50% of your users would gladly pay a more reasonable amount for this software. My own ceiling would be $100/yr before I’d even really give it a second thought at this point. You have no competition, which is a product of your own brilliance and who you are.

Where I’m coming from - I’ve run software companies, and I know what kinds of pricing structures make the P&L work vs make it unnecessarily hard. That means more sustainable software development, which is good for us users.

Risk to us: Someone like you, especially an outlier force-muliplying developer like you, could be earning $300-500k/yr with salaries/bonuses on top of health insurance, stock options. If not even more than that. And any Fortune 10 company would hire you.

The fact that you’re famous makes that even more of a risk for us using BTT.

That’s why pricing structure that exceeds that ROI for you is a win-win for us users.

You could also hire someone to do the more boring tasks of things like porting a less feature-rich version over to Windows, localizing the software to the main secondary markets of France/Germany, get someone to put you through SOC2 compliance and light enterprise marketing / website upgrade, which would open up enterprise sales. Latter, you’d likely follow Yammer and Slack adoption style where people depend on your software, then demand IT makes it available in the company, and back into a large enterprise user-base. Right now I imagine BTT isn’t white-listed, and there are huge droves of developers at giant companies who depend on BTT and can’t use it at work.

Again, that would be a massive win-win for users who can’t even use BTT now.

I pull my eyes out every time I have to use Windows partly because BTT isn’t there.

Those are just a couple things that would double/triple your user base over time.

And anything that makes it so more users who want to use BTT can actually use BTT is a service to your users, who would be glad to have it. Which I think would align with your passion for making this software in the first place.

I’m sure some people will complain about a price increase. Once you have more than 20 users on any piece of software, people will gripe about having to pay more than $5 for anything. Just par for the course with any consumer product. You capture both light users and heavy users in discrete pricing tiers this way.

*Regardless of us using our own compute budgets for it, it’s still a big feature to maintain and justifies a higher tier

Happy to talk more about this.

[Frank1]

Dear @Joe.the.Monk, I’ve been around for a long time, too. You can be sure that the developer of BTT has already thought about what you’re suggesting a hundred times over. He’s doing things his way and has his reasons for it. He’s successful; I hope he’s happy, too, and he’s obviously always made the right decisions. I’m sure it will stay this way, with or without our well-meaning advice.

BTT is the best thing that could have happened to the Mac. Use it, enjoy it, and just let the guy do his thing

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

Correct, don't worry. BTT is still doing great (better than ever) and I feel the pricing structure is fair to me and my users. (Of course anything can change with AI in the next years, but increasing the price won't help there. Until a year ago I always thought Apple would kill BTT with some macOS upgrade, now it's more likely that some AI stuff will - but so be it. )

All the things you mention would take a lot of the fun out of the project, even if I delegate them to somebody else. All the big companies are using BTT in some places, they sometimes ask for SOC2 etc. but in the end they never care.

[swn]

I remember this back in 2014 when you were still in school and I was wondering how you were handing all this.

[swn]

lol this is hilarious about Apple and now Ai might be killing BTT lol

But I'm not sure if you are aware or not, but you are already integrating Ai in BTT that means you are ahead once again. Every company must adapt to changes or you ceased to exist.

What I advise you do is either create another product that will have similar fuctuionalities as BTT but in the Ai era.(Or a completely new product-Ai related) So you will be ahead, because there are chances someone out there might do this, and you will be stuck with BTT and you won’t have place in the Ai rink as someone else might have created that. Keep woking on BTT and on the side start something new on the side(ai, related) so basically like you are back in 2013 in university while working BTT on the side. But in this case it’s a new project for different times.

[Joe.the.Monk]

Fair enough! Suffice it to say I just think you’re awesome, and BTT is incredible.

I think that even if AI can make shortcuts of a sort, beyond a dozen you quickly wind up needing some sort of dedicated GUI to manage them, and that backs you into needing an application like BTT. I think it’s here to say. And I second the comment above that you’ve doubly killed part of that use-case by making it so there’s a brilliant AI bot in the app that can make shortcuts for us.

Every 30 seconds something I’m doing or some automation somewhere uses some part of BTT. I have ~500+ shortcuts of all sorts in it. You have no idea how grateful I am for the stability and fast fixes you achieve with this.

Btw - from BTT’s AI bot (albeit, I think its breakdown is off as pretty sure I have more disabled than enabled). Definitely a power user LOL:

[Joe.the.Monk]

BTW - Anyone up for a posturing competition to see who has the most BTT triggers?