Software Piracy was the seed of product-driven growth

Pirates did what marketing departments couldn’t: they got the product into millions of hands without spending a dime on customer acquisition.

Back in the early day of software, developers realized that piracy was a huge challenge. It’s the digital equivalent of swiping candy from a baby, if that candy cost hundreds of dollars and the baby was a multinational corporation. While CEOs clutched their pearls over lost revenues, a funny thing happened: piracy became the unintentional catalyst for product-driven growth. Yes, the very scourge of the software industry ended up teaching companies how to thrive.

At the Baukunst Creative Technologists conference in New York last week, someone dropped a truism that hadn’t occurred to me before — but the product-driven growth playbook is remarkably close to the early days of piracy: Back when the internet sounded like a fax machine having a meltdown, software was sold in shiny boxes at eye-watering prices. Naturally, people found “alternative” ways to get their hands on it. Pirated copies spread like wildfire, slipping through the fingers of companies that tried desperately to stamp them out. But here’s the plot twist: instead of sinking the industry, piracy inadvertently turned these products into…