How has revenue changed during the AI period? Are you guys able to maintain or grow with the rise of coding agents?
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
They are regular users, not developers.
Rather than using this as your world-view, I think you should take this as a signal to expand the current bubble you live in. I'm guessing most of these people you refer to as "non technical" are still white-collar workers or similar?
Most people in the world, even with all the marketing towards "non developer business users", has never heard of "Claude", "Gemini", "Grok" or anything else LLM-adjacent like that, but will have some light understanding of "ChatGPT", and might actually be using some AI service via their phone or whatever, but still call that "ChatGPT" as that's essentially synonymous with "AI" in common parlance.
ok.
This is a case study of how a software company can still make money in the age of ai.
My guess is that the impact of ai on the business won't be too much as they have a good brand and a loyal customer base whereas the vibecoded ones will have a hard time getting noticed by customers. They will also have a competitive advantage by being able to handle so many different types of files, by being a one-stop-shop if you like. They will be able to attract more customers by handling really obscure file formats and in some cases by being able to do a better job of the conversion (desktop publishing and vector formats are an example). There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.
If they've been in business this long, they must have, by now, internal filetypes for specific classes of formats. For example, all rgb files first convert to an RGB format, and then to the destination format. Or, all transcription first convert to an internal format, and then to the destination format.
Not sure how you'd handle .ps or .pdf files in this way, though.