Growth, growth, growth

We’ve become obsessed with growth in building businesses. It has turned into the metric that most aspire to: more users, more revenue, more investment. If you’re not growing, it’s seen as a sign you’re doing something wrong.

But when growth becomes the ultimate goal, the people you’re building for often become an afterthought. Instead of creating for them, you use them as tools to achieve growth. This dehumanizes them, leading to strategies that often feel exploitative.

For example, some businesses publicly criticize others’ work to exploit “schadenfreude.” They actively look for people making mistakes to capitalize on the audience’s curiosity for negativity—using it as a marketing tool. How crazy is that? Sure, anything is possible in business, but come on—it’s perfectly fine to grow more slowly if it means contributing to a better, healthier society instead of making it worse.

Another practice I find exploitative is what I call “open-washing.” Some companies, desperate for shortcuts to growth, think they can buy everything with money—including the intangible assets of open-source projects, such as their brands and communities. They treat these assets as mere marketing tools. They throw a few crumbs in the form of donations or sponsorships and then loudly claim to be “an open-source company.” It’s not much different from brands sending cheap promotional items to influencers, hoping for exposure. This is capital-rich companies taking advantage of the human-centered work of others who truly know how to build and nurture communities.

This insatiable appetite for growth shows up in many areas—not just marketing. Products are riddled with “contact sales” buttons, proprietary technologies designed to create vendor lock-in, and intentionally opaque pricing models that exploit customers’ negotiation skills. The list goes on. Sadly, when you search for companies that define success differently, the options are few and far between. These companies exist, but they’re rare.

We could follow these same exploitative paths ourselves, but we refuse to fuel those strategies. In fact, we’re actively working to reverse these models. We believe we need healthier, more human ecosystems—where individualism gives way to community, proprietary technology is replaced by open solutions, and people’s agency to choose the best tools for their needs is respected rather than manipulated.

This shift is only possible if we prioritize people’s joy over growth—and that’s exactly what we’re doing at Tuist.