This is very awesome and super useful! When you rely heavily on Stripe events it can get out of control. Stripe needs a doc with real world scenarios and what events get called. I'm definitely going to try and port this to Python.
I built http://remindeat.com a couple of months ago as an experiment with my girlfriend and seems like people really liked it. I might still build a mobile app for it. I also recently built http://feedleap.com which really launched off by itself with Kippt's popularity.
I've never seen it put more bluntly and truthfully than "the original product was the business." I always find it creepy to see all these founders and investors and Y-Combinator folks patting themselves on their backs for a hefty exit. It's like saying "well done gentlemen, we fooled them all the way through." Since I have been aware of this, I have decided I don't want investors meddling around in my decisions, or if I even want a business at all. Open source projects seem like a more honest and longterm way to champion a product that I truly care about (which is not the case with most of these "startup guys".) Having a successful business seems to always devolve into just making more and more profit, and those interests permeate back into every decision. Which is why people are so worried about Parse's future with Facebook, and what's also happening to Google in ever increasing levels now with G+. I look up to Mozilla these days, hope they don't fall off the deep end with Mozilla Corp's Firefox OS.
You may also develop a commercial product and still care about it. Profit does not mean a product is doomed to be milked. Its the attitude of the business towards that product. In case of Parse, I always thought they would strongly grow into an independent companny. Maybe bought by someone else, though not Facebook.
Another point is that developing businesses as products is aslo neccesary. This allows bigger companies with cash flow but without the talent to simply shop around for their next offering.
Very few care deeply for the original product -- just as much as needed for the eventual payoff. If they did they wouldn't let it dissolve into the hands of some humongous company like Google/Facebook et al (especially since 9 out of 10 of such acquisitions end with the product being halted).
Sometimes the original thing isn't even a product. It's a bunch of free stuff offered to get as many users as possible that could never stand of it's own (no monetization options) and only a acquire could save it (the buying company can then use it as a acqui-hire, to get some press and street cred, to build something else, as part of a larger, different offering, etc).
Sometimes caring deeply for the product means you need help to get it where it needs to be, and sometimes getting it where it needs to be means being acquired by another company to help get it there.
If the second thing happened a lot I'd agree. But I don't know many cases where the product doesn't either halt, or degenerate rapidly after being acquired by another company.
I'm sure one can think of one or two such cases. But can they think of ten?
So that reasoning I don't think applies. The founders know that the product will go down the drain post acquisition, but they still do it for the money.
