Personally, I don't really do it for the money or making it big. I do it because it's fun, a learning experience and exciting. And I think a lot of other developers feel the same way as I.
And really, why settle with the mediocre? Aim for the stars and at some point switch direction for the closest moon if the journey becomes too long. Aiming for the closest moon might be a good strategy in some circumstances, but if one has the capacity to aim for the stars then why not do it?
However .. I feel compelled to point out that if you're anywhere on the way to a star, you'll find yourself in an interstellar micro-vacuum with no moons in sight.
If you manage to reach a moon from there, you might as well travel the (now) insignificant distance on to the nearest star.
(I'm very sorry, I just had to point this out. Really, it was a lovely analogy.. ).
This post is full of sweeping generalizations. Not all developers are working on a startup. There are also more startups out there that start without everyone being a (software) developer. Not all startups do software, for that matter.
With the dot-com rise and bust, the web-2.0 rise (and already, some say, bust) and the developers, salesdroids, business suits all blogging about this kind of work constantly - there is enough material out there to make an informed decision about the risk you're taking and the challenges and pitfalls you face as well as the potential fallout if it goes bust.
This post would have been better titled 'Some developers take risks without doing their homework'.
Not to pick on this author in particular, but I wish I had an easy way to filter out everything said about startups by people who haven't personally done it successfully.
This doesn't strike me as a good idea at all. You're deliberately inducing an enormous selection bias in your knowledge. Or put another way, if a successful founder says "doing X is a good idea and made a big difference", but there were ten other unsuccessful founders who also tried doing X and had it backfire, isn't the experience of those ten other founders useful information? Taleb discusses this phenomena in "Fooled by Randomness" in the context of the financial industry, and it's a good recipe for bandwagoning and cargo-cult thinking.
Now I agree that I would prefer to only hear advice about startups by people who have tried doing it at all.
Playing guitar, just like business success are subjective. I consider 37signals, youtube and balsamiq successful and they contain few common elements (except making things people want).
When listening to business advice I listen to those that have failed often; one of the best talks I have ever had was with a taxi driver who once owned an entire fleet of tourist buses but went under. Failure is often more useful to listen to than success.
I want to hear people talk of experiences they've actually had. In the case of someone who has failed, I'm interested in hearing their reflections on how and why they failed. That's not the same as them telling me how to succeed at the thing.
I agree, but listening to someone who has failed is different than listening to someone who has never even tried, which is what I think the OP was getting at.
No, but if they listen to a lot of music you might value their opinions on who plays well, and even what the common characteristics of good players are.
I think the point is not so much about whether one should take a chance or not, but more about how much risk you're willing to take when creating software.
You know what, it sounds like the author just read Fooled By Randomness and watched DHH's talk at Startup School 07, and then did a Jeff Atwood.
This would've been interesting a year ago, somewhere closer to the height of excitement about web2.0, multimillion venture rounds and crazy valuations. Not now, a couple of months after the collapse of the capital markets.
Great article. It really surprises me how many people are building products that rely on the "get huge then make money from advertising" model. Personally I couldn't imagine investing years on a project without a reasonable expectation of getting paying customers.
Giving a (web) service away and having no reliable way to turn users into paying customers is a losing game.
A product that I think is great, but which confuses me is Weebly. They have some excellent technology and offer a really awesome service, but their numbers are terrible. 1Million users and 1% paying customers! What other industry has 1% of customers supporting 99% of the rest?
I would rather have 1000 paying customers than 1Million eyeballs that are just there for the ride.
You wouldn't have the 1,000 paying customers without the 1,000,000 eyeballs to get them with then. It's not like it costs Weebly much to run those websites, and they essentially act as free SEO for their pay service.
there's something honestly enjoyable for us in providing a free service that is useful to people. besides the point already mentioned (that it doesn't cost us that much), we're genuinely happy that we can help people and make their lives better. if at some point you help us generate revenue, that's great, but even if you don't, we're happy that we could make your life easier -- that's our perspective.
why do you think of it as "giving it away"? it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user, and it's a useful, free service for most people.
how many people have argued that file sharing should be legal, or that CDs and paid music are on their way out? it's the same concept, and you have to eat your own dogfood, to some extent.
"it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user"
you just contradicted yourself. You're saying you don't give anything away and yet there is an associated cost to providing the service.
The holistic approach is nice, but "making people happy" doesn't pay the bills, and if you're ever looking for investors (not saying that you should) then this argument will get you laughed out of the board room.
I'm not criticizing your service - I think its great, really useful and polished. What bothers me is consumer mentality. The idea that "I'm willing to take advantage of a useful service but not willing to pay for it".
In a sense though all the free web services out there are feeding the perception that web sites are free by giving away too much. Have you ever heard of a free plumbing, or child care or any other service?
Bandwidth, storage and most importantly developer hours cost money - stop devaluing your own services!!
Personally i think that a focus on small business or enterprise software gives a much better chance of long term success (which i measure as dollars in the bank, not smiles on faces).
Love your product as well as the great tech that you have created - if I was a user I would definitely be a paying one ;)
> The quiet successes by small teams who stand little if anything to gain by sharing their numbers and telling about their success. Lest they attract competitors or other unwanted interest.
This is the money quote from the linked David Hansson article. I personally know of five small companies that have minted multi-millionaires that have ZERO web presence for their products. I suspect discrete pursuit of an industry niche is actually the dominant path to riches, but you'd never know it if you only relied on the media and google.
I can assure you I had nothing to do with it, or any other one. In fact, I continue to be amazed at people showing me as an example...I'm just a little little company building a little little product!
Antonio is a reputable blogger, and this article isn't spam. Besides that, he barely mentions what Balsamiq does and doesn't even recommend anyone, much less developers, use it. You could hardly say that he's "touting" the software by mentioning it to support his point.
And really, why settle with the mediocre? Aim for the stars and at some point switch direction for the closest moon if the journey becomes too long. Aiming for the closest moon might be a good strategy in some circumstances, but if one has the capacity to aim for the stars then why not do it?