This is all fantastic and crucial, but please don't assume that Heroku's success was solely due to these technological ideas. (It's the typical assumption us hackers make).
Being a YC company Heroku had immediate access to a bunch of startups (potential customers, AND early feedback givers), and I wonder how much biz dev such as talks at conferences, blogging, social-mediaing, etc, they did in parallel to these tech advances.
Most people don't get the 'schlep' as pg wrote about recently. Startup success stories aren't all about One Amazing Idea and the code that goes with it. It's about the whole ride.
Absolutely! Ironically I was investigating Heroku in order to think more about markets, and why its market worked. But I can see that my writeup ends up focussing more on the apparently technical side.
It's really about the market aspects of the technical side though. Why people didn't like the online code editor, but did like the straightforward solving of the Rails hosting and scaling problem. Why that particular product was a successful route to a PaaS business at that time, when often other apparently similar ones have failed.
Would love to learn more about Heroku's biz dev stuff that you talk about!
Being a YC company Heroku had immediate access to a bunch of startups (potential customers, AND early feedback givers), and I wonder how much biz dev such as talks at conferences, blogging, social-mediaing, etc, they did in parallel to these tech advances.