

Competitive advantages of developer-run businesses - itsderek23
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/01/26/developer-run-business-advantages

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gxs
This may be the wrong venue (e.g. site for startups), but there is a reason
the big companies have people that specialize in each of the areas he claims a
founder/developer has an advantage in.

While early in the business you benefit mostly in saving money by doing it all
yourself, eventually you will want to hire people do these things for you.

A ceo's job is not to be in the trenches answering tech support calls- while
that sounds nice on paper, his job, especially when you hit some serious
growth is to be looking 5/10 years down the line.

I work at a ~6mil/year revenue company that is <10 years old. I've been here
for 3 of those years. In that time, the biggest hurdle I've observed is
precisely that- watching the technical CEO relinquish some of his control in
order to focus more on growth strategy and quality of the product.

~~~
DenisM
Article: when you are small, do X because big guy can't do X.

You: when you are big, don't do X.

Your post looks like you wanted to disagree with something, yet you are in
complete agreement with the article.

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eande
I do share the observation of technical leaders with a quick observation very
well and it has 2 sides of the coin. It can be crucial in the early stage for
a company to survive. Some people see it as control, but on the other side it
often carries a certain degree of success. The flip side is that kind of close
relation of the founder/CEO to customer and not letting go the control can
limit growth of a company. And if the company keeps increasing on
revenue/employees and the situation has not much improved it sometimes turns
to chaos within the organization.

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itsderek23
There's a common perception that answering support inquires is a waste of
time. I agree - it's a problem if you're spending a lot of time debugging
issues that aren't incorporated back into the product. It's not an issue if
it's good feedback that helps build a better product for everyone else. Most
of our support inquires are the latter.

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hga
Hmmm---when you adopt this model you have to be careful you aren't running a
consulting business if you think you're a startup (e.g. you'll be underpricing
yourself.

