

Developers are blinded by the light - acangiano
http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/30/developers-are-blinded-by-the-light/

======
amix
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?

~~~
mpk
I agree and I like your analogy.

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.. ).

~~~
randallsquared
Brown dwarfs might well have moons... unless you call them planets, I guess...

------
mpk
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'.

------
sant0sk1
What an informative read! I always thought it was: "wrapped up like a douche
in the middle of the night." =]

~~~
auston
That was the first thing I thought.

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gruseom
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.

~~~
mlinsey
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.

~~~
gruseom
As Putin said to Sarkozy, you have a point there :)

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drinian
Yeah, but some silicone sister (with a manager, mister) told me I got what it
takes.

------
Prrometheus
Moral of the story: you can sell a fart application for the desktop, too, even
if it isn't as glamorous as a fart application for the iphone.

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hassy
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.

------
edw519
If loving a chance for success is wrong, I don't want to be right.

~~~
lhorie
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.

------
markessien
That 'article' reads like a summary of 2008 of news.yc.

~~~
acangiano
I know you didn't intend what you said to come across as being nice, but I'll
take it as a compliment. :)

------
eli_s
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.

~~~
emmett
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.

~~~
eli_s
It depends which sector you target. If you make software for business users
there is never an expectation that a service is free.

Small costs can quickly balloon when you reach figures of a million plus.

The SEO is certainly a plus, however this exposure still needs to turn into
dollars in the bank if you want to keep the lights on.

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kingkongrevenge
> 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.

------
giardini
IIRC this is the second submission on HN that is a submarine SPAM article
touting the Balsamiq software for developers.

~~~
balsamiq
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!

