I made a healthy 6-figures pa in the Mac App Store with zero marketing for 3-4 years when I first got into software. That was about timing and getting a few products right.
Plenty of stories like that. Just like there are plenty of stories where companies, say, had everything locked down but engineering and failed.
I've never met a successful entrepreneur who spoke in absolutes. To a person they've all admitted there's a lot of luck / timing / chaos involved.
I've met failed entrepreneurs with degrees and funding and plans -- people who on paper did everything right.
I used to work with a global streaming service in 2006/2007. They had exclusive streaming rights for major sporting events, way before ESPN and others.
Their tech stack was custom built and primarily designed by a single developer. The company grew rapidly, but he kept all the institutional knowledge.
They were winning more streaming content, but couldn't promote it it launch it on time because their developer held the keys to the castle and all changes were funneled through him.
Unfortunately, the company couldn't grow at such a slow pace of development and the parent company shut them down with about a hundred people losing their jobs.
Well, that's really an organizational failure as much as an engineering one. Same as telling the sales manager, "You're responsible for sales, but you can't hire any sales persons."
I'm in Silicon Valley and I see a lot of strange things, but I've never seen a business fail because of product performance or wrong choice of computer language or framework, but:
- Friendster did have significant site performance issues that may have contributed to it getting marginalized.
- Twitter routinely showed the "fail whale" until they got their act together.
- eBay was 30 days late in doing their Japanese version, which allowed Yahoo Auctions to dominate that country. (Their whole i18n situation was a fiasco with parallel US and non-US code bases and url-based locale setting.)
- Real Media sold their real5 streaming server to most US radio stations, yet could never get G2 server to work reliably.
- I've talked to startups with a 50,000 LOC web product and 200,000 lines of test code. I'm curious how that worked out.
I made a healthy 6-figures pa in the Mac App Store with zero marketing for 3-4 years when I first got into software. That was about timing and getting a few products right.
Plenty of stories like that. Just like there are plenty of stories where companies, say, had everything locked down but engineering and failed.
I've never met a successful entrepreneur who spoke in absolutes. To a person they've all admitted there's a lot of luck / timing / chaos involved.
I've met failed entrepreneurs with degrees and funding and plans -- people who on paper did everything right.