Coyier on complaints about CodePen's redesign from long-time users who never upgraded. He counts those nine unpaid years as the company's own failure, and still says he can't build the next version around those users.
we're trying to do. And it's, it's mostly fine, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, I think like the podcast addressed it really well. Just like, yeah, it's like, you know, we, we know if we're going to launch, people hate new things immediately. You know, that's the default reaction, you know, like
there's some hard lessons in here. Like, here's an example that, yeah. You, some user has a real affinity for CodePen. They've been using it for a long time, say nine years or something like that. They've never once upgraded. They're a long time user. It's not like they have no value. Maybe they created stuff that got shared around. Maybe there are some inherent markets. Marketing or something, but still not really a strong customer. That's a fail in my book. That's like us failing as a company. Nine years of usage of this product, and you never once felt compelled to become a paying customer of it. In a way, I'm not building the next generation of CodePen for you. I'm not. I can't do that. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision. I need to make a new code pen for new people that aren't you that might be compelled to pay.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's just how it is. You know, I mean, you can't get trapped in by thinking, oh, what a loyal person. Their voice is looms large in this house. It doesn't. It should loom less. I don't want to piss them off. They can hang around. I'm not trying to take anything away from that person. I just can't…
Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. There is this element of like, cool. Like, I'm glad you like what we have. And, you know, what we have is great, but it was not great enough for you to pay for it. So I would love to architect a tool that people are willing to pay for. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. And if you…
