Pursuant to Grow Slow, Ambitious Programmer, will attempt to collect domains of business where VC-funded/large corps have strong structural disadvantage against an organism like Alloy.

linkIterated heuristics

It's really hard to create heuristics-based businesses with many stakeholders.

This is almost certainly why nobody solved Background Burner even though it wasn't that hard of a problem.

This is why GitClear has had ~zero competition from companies building their own multi-faceted version of Line Impact. Who at Code Climate would be qualified to prescribe the exact set of factors that should combine to represent Line Impact?

Why doesn't Task Score exist in Todoist, Wunderlist, etc.? Nobody has the necessary combination of authority, execution ability, and fortitude to withstand inevitable backlash.

Even the smaller VC-backed businesses that might not be stopped by those three factors still have to set aside conventional wisdom of 2020s that their app must use Machine Learning and AI if it's going to be a proper investment vehicle. Those approaches don't lend themselves to a long-term best-case output, and are hard to defend when they make stupid decisions.

linkConvergent features / going deep / taking a single idea further and further

Immutable truth: The more stakeholders, the more different directions a company is pulled. If the difference between a VC-backed company and a micro-company were represented in biology, the VC-backed company would look like cell with 100 appendages slowly growing outwards in every direction. A microco would have like 3 appendages growing further and further until they wrap around the cell twice.

Everybody has a little different idea for what the "fully realized" version of their product should be. Who in a large company has incentive to reign in all those divergent visions?

Even if there was someone in the company who had incentive to reign in all the divergent ideas, it's really, really difficult to coordinate a team of 15 developers working on the same few features. Meetings are necessary, work gets duplicated, bad feelings fester unless communication is strong. There is much greater efficiency when each dev unit pursues a distinct project. Like Amplecap vs Amplenote. Thus, hiring many devs creates a strong gravity toward implementing divergent features. See ClickUp competitive review as example 1A.

A simple heuristic might be: any note taking or productivity app that implements their own chat window has missed the opportunity to take good ideas deep. They have been distracted by too many stakeholders.

Also why Rich Footnotes seem like should be hard to copy for a bigco, because representing them requires precision and systems coordination.

linkHonestly admitting weakness / creating useful comparison indexes

WTSO and NoteApps.info don't happen from a VC-backed company for many reasons. First because you don't want to admit that you don't always win. Second because you fear ridicule too much to make an honest attempt to do the job fairly. Maybe we do get ridiculed but we also address the criticisms received as transparently as possible. If we can objectively create the best app, then we can be confident we'll eventually win, but there's no timeline on when that needs to happen, which skews incentives too far from honesty.

linkSimplicity

Somewhat related to "Convergent features," if you have money, then you hire a dev team, which means that functionality needs to be split between silos. New Relic is exhibit A of how a collection of siloed teams tries to create a cohesive experience. Clickup is an example in the productivity space that dazzles with a huge degree of intertwined systems, but "simple to start"is not what this app is going for when it shows its mandatory 1min tutorial of the CEO building a ship in a bottle. Neither is the app going to be mistaken for bug-free, since all of the different areas have to occasionally interact, usually to disastrous effect. As is oft evidenced in ClickUp competitive review

linkTransparency

The Taskade Privacy Policy seems to be a symptom of having cash for lawyers available, and VCs that want to use it.

linkDogfooding

Micro-companies have no separation between "wishing the app was better based upon using it" and "making the app better." Even a single step, where the CEO has to convince a single developer (not a team) to fix tiny bugs and make tiny visual improvements, makes those things exponentially less likely to happen.

linkPerformance

Keeping overall app performance acceptable requires the coordination of many layers of the system, plus a mandate from on high that performance is sufficiently important to muster all that coordination. These circumstances seem more likely to conspire on a small team.