The cost of following the crowd

Why we decided to trust our gut and build Tuist differently

We’re surrounded by information every day, and whether we like it or not, this input influences our decisions.

This is especially true when you’re building a company for the first time and looking for references to guide your choices. It’s tempting to mimic what others do, thinking they must be doing it because they’re successful—but that’s not necessarily the case. As a result, we end up with many companies that look the same, and innovation stagnates.

A good example is marketing in the developer tooling space. Many companies pay to plaster their logos on every conference and newsletter, but is that really the most effective approach? I doubt it. Yet it’s what everyone does, so if you have the capital, you’ll be inclined to follow suit.

I’ll admit we sometimes let ourselves get influenced by this pattern at Tuist, until we realized we weren’t making decisions for ourselves anymore. There’s something exciting about trusting your gut feelings and intuitions when building a company. We like doing things differently, and that’s what personally motivates me about building Tuist. It’s exciting, though uncomfortable at times, because you’re venturing down unconventional paths.

We decided to base our marketing on writing content around our vision for the space and sharing our technical and business learnings. We try to make our content an oasis in a desert of quick attention-seeking posts, and people seem to appreciate that approach. We’re challenging established conventions and entering uncontested spaces with fresh ideas—like the iOS app we’re building where people can create and share previews and releases. Think about it: releases on the go! We’re going unconventional with our open model too. We noticed other tools in the space went proprietary, but that doesn’t align with our principles, so we decided to embrace a different approach where we’ll eventually have the entire Tuist suite open source.

Building something unique is the most rewarding part of building Tuist. Sure, we could enter an existing market, copy established models, and capture market share by pushing margins down—like what’s happening in the mobile CI space, where companies don’t realize their layer is disappearing. That would be easier, but we’d end up with a short-term viable company facing long-term risks. The question “will this work financially?” is always in the back of my head, but I’m confident it will. By staying true to our unconventional path, we’re not just building a business—we’re uncovering uncontested markets where we can be first movers, backed by a powerful community around our open source model that will be incredibly hard for competitors to replicate.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​