Most of the companies you’re describing fold and fail miserably after just a few years. Only very, very, very, very, very few of them achieve any kind of significant funding or market success.
I wonder why?
I wonder why?
Do you need to pay 20 programmers rather than 10?
Do you have a higher customer turnover rate because they encounter too many bugs and lose trust in the system?
Do you lose out on sales because you can't close the feature gaps with your competitors?
Are you unable to respond to customer support requests in a timely fashion because there are too many, or fixing the problems is really hard?
Code quality can't make a business succeed. But sufficiently bad code can cause a business to fail.
I recall fixing a major problem where we could not collect any direct debits for 6-7 months and we put one of the most high profile UK tech journalist's bank account intro the red - that made the Guardian.
Neither I or the company secretary ever got a thank you for recovering in todays terms several million pounds.
When you sell software to non-tech companies, they’re used to failures. We have 1 supplier out of more than 1200, who hasn’t screwed up majorly at one point or the other.
In a world where that’s a fact, and people have just sort of learned to live with shitty software and IT that doesn’t always works. The key selling point for any major product is cost, and upfront cost weighs so much more than cost-down-the-line. Especially in management where managers won’t be around 4-8 years later when the contract is up for renewal.