

Sampa: From Birth to Death (A Startup's Journey) - datums
http://blog.calbucci.com/marcelo-calbucci/brave-tech-world/Sampa-From-Birth-to-Death.htm

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alex_c
Having worked on something very similar to Sampa, this was a fascinating read.
Thank you for posting it.

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davi
FTA:

'From the get go, the product was not task oriented (as in “I want to upload
some pictures and do a blog post about it”), but very object-oriented (an
hierarchy of folders, with security, objects, drag-and-drop, etc.).'

This clicked for me. Everyone probably knows it already, but I never got it
this crisply until now. There is a spectrum between user and programmer.
Depending on what you're building, you can build in a lot of leverage for your
users by making your tool _less_ programmable. Apple does this the best.

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justin_vanw
Comment I left on his blog:

I can't imagine how much that sucks.

On the other hand, you go to be your own boss and run with something for
several years. Frankly, I don't even see what the point of Sampa was.
Geocities was around in 1996. Maybe if you had started early enough you could
have sold before the business model issues became so critical you weren't able
to ignore them, but realistically that was your only exit strategy, much like
geocities and youtube.

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suvike
Geocities WAS around in 1996 - but Weebly was started in 2006/2007, and
they're doing quite well, business model and all. The "website builder" space
is likely not saturated, and there's definitely room in business areas such as
the author was originally targeting. Again, it's all about the implementation.

