

Heroku’s early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million - frabcus
http://www.flourish.org/blog/?p=687

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fomojola
Do several things well. Double down on the ones people like.

Got to say: I think that was one of the best summaries I've seen yet of the
path to success. Excellent writeup.

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arturadib
This is all fantastic and crucial, but please don't assume that Heroku's
success was solely due to these technological ideas. (It's the typical
assumption us hackers make).

Being a YC company Heroku had immediate access to a bunch of startups
(potential customers, AND early feedback givers), and I wonder how much biz
dev such as talks at conferences, blogging, social-mediaing, etc, they did in
parallel to these tech advances.

~~~
iusable
T.H.I.S.

Most people don't get the 'schlep' as pg wrote about recently. Startup success
stories aren't all about One Amazing Idea and the code that goes with it. It's
about the whole ride.

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amirmc
See also the (great) video by Adam of Heroku at the 2011 Startup Lessons
Learned conference

"The Epic Pivot - Heroku's Story" (20mins):
<http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/286516447>

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gravitronic
Article seemed to have some amount of credibility until the part about Mac OSX
making shell code "hip" around 2009 that until then would have scared Windows
users... (wtf)

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frabcus
Yeah, sorry - that part was a bit brief, and is only a hunch. I genuinely
think though that the command line is more popular now than, say, 10 years
ago.

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andypants
I think it's simply related to the fact that the Mac OS has become more
popular, not necessarily the command line.

Only a correlation. Regular users generally don't use the command line.

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shabble
Normal users, sure. But I wonder what fraction of developers use
regularly/have ever used commandline tools?

I can certainly see some environments in which you might never be exposed, in
things like Visual Studio, XCode, or Eclipse.

My recollection is that Windows has never really had a good native shell, but
I've not used win7 for any length of time, and I'm not sure if Powershell ever
became a thing. There's also cygwin, but I'm pretty sure that'll be more
remote still.

I have a suspicion that the reason Github appears so mac-dominated is because
of the pain of dealing with git under windows, especially when tortoise-git
wasn't around/stable. Then again, there always seemed to be a heavy rails/OSX
connection, but I don't know exactly where that comes from.

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philwelch
DHH and 37signals are vocal Mac users, and that's where Rails came from.

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jurre
Very nice post. I would love to see more of these!

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chris123
Nice post/concept/analysis. Keep it up :)

