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Build a Tiny Product First

stackingthebricks.com

19 pointsallending7 comments

This post implies relationship between 37 Signals success and the ebook.

But really their success was all about Ruby On Rails and the community and publicity and audience that brought.

So I’m not sure quite what to make of this post.

They were a success long before Ruby on Rails. The article doesn't quite connect the dots, but they were so successful as a consulting company that they created Basecamp as an internal tool to manage their own products. And then Basecamp was such a hit with their clients that they sold it as a service. And when that service became a massive success, they open-sourced the framework they'd built it on. [1]

[1] https://basecamp.com/about/story

I've wished more than once that I'd started by selling a one-off course instead of an endless subscription of screencasts.

Haven't slept in a few days, but I feel like there are some strong implication here that I'm not grasping. Can you explain?

i did this. spend a couple weeks building out my saas.

then got disheartened when the major ad agencies (reddit, facebook) rejected my app because it competes with tinder/etc and is a dating app service augmenter.

so... yeah i left it to rot.

Why would ad agencies reject an app?? You are not allowed to advertise Tinder clones??

I'm not sure what their problem is. In facebook's case, they have a dating app so I'm sure they're not into that.

Facebook doesn't give you much actionable feedback. Here's the routine I went through _several times_ publishing my ad there.

1. submit app

2. app gets rejected, and my account gets banned. get a generic message saying dating apps need to adhere to special, strict guidelines, and I need to sign up as a Dating service with Facebook's customer service team.

3. I try to sign up for it, and they tell me I don't qualify as a dating service (cause my app is not a dating service, it's an augmentation on it - getsmartswipe.com). So back to square one after this contradictory mess.

4. I submit repeal to unban me.

5. They unban me.

6. I change some wording hoping maybe that's the change they wanted.

7. go to (1)

reddit, similar. I'm sure they made it confusing on purpose but in Reddit's case they took a week to reject it and said I needed to commit a minimum of 30k to advertise dating apps and work directly with them. Made no sense, so I didn't bother retrying with Reddit.

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