

How we built a web application and didn't launch in 482 days - dools
http://www.decalcms.com/page/How_we_didnt_launch_in_482_days

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synnik
My initial startup was a CMS product in 1999.

At the time, there were few players, and few open source products. We were
able to charge from $25,000 to well over $200,000 per implementation. We even
had one contract for over a million to do a custom version of our codebase.
And we were a bit player at the time who didn't even survive the dotcom crash.

Fast forward to today -- There are so many CMS products that you don't need to
pay for them at all, and even if you do pay, they are not expensive.

Which is to say that these guys deserve a heck of a lot of credit. They are
making it work for them in a very crowded space, solving problems that I had
written off as solved.

Good work.

~~~
dools
A million bucks! Don't make me drool :P Talk about the glory days of CMS.

There are still "enterprise" solutions going for that much these days - you
need a fair bit of "infrastructure" in your company to sell to those folks
though, and probably insane levels of enterprise features (that look good on
paper but are probably the reason most people that work at big organisations
hate their CMS :)

Thanks for taking the time to read and comment, and for the kind words. The
real test, of course, will be when we open our doors for _real_ public
feedback with live demos/public signup products. Fingers crossed!

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alanh
Most interesting part:

> _you usually don't have to do things as fast as you think you do. … David
> Heinemeier Hansson describes VC as a time bomb. Once you light the fuse, you
> have to make your business work within a short period of time._

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rokhayakebe
From the article:

CEO of Wistia on customer acquisition:

 _Brendan and I started Wistia in June of 2006. We quit our jobs and went in
fulltime. It took us almost one year to the day to get our first customer. It
took us another year to get to 6 customers. It took us another year to reach
60 customers. This past summer, 1460 days after starting Wistia we crossed 350
customers_

~~~
paulirish
As a chart:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+{2006%2C0}%2C+{200...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+{2006%2C0}%2C+{2007%2C+1}%2C+{2008%2C6}%2C+{2009%2C+60}%2C+{2010%2C+350}&a=*C.plot-_*PlotsWord-)

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locusm
Love that photo - who needs a plush office when you can plant your MBP on a
couple of milk crates!

~~~
dools
Haha yeah that's pretty "aussie style" software development there :)

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adamzais
do yourself a solid...check out decalcms!

