People are always going to neg you in order to try to get more out of you.

During the 00’s I worked for a place that had to pivot because they had a good tool but it wasn’t a daily driver and so the customers didn’t want to pay. They kept imagining some free alternative must exist that didn’t.

They eventually got an exit. Didn’t make anyone rich but they did. But the thing is I showed up to work on that tool, not knowing they’d already pivoted. I did eventually get to work on it a bit, as we found a way to improve one of our other products by fixing bugs in it. I’m kinda glad in retrospect I didn’t work on it first because the code was a mess.