Developers are blinded by the light
antoniocangiano.com
antoniocangiano.com
And really, why settle with the mediocre? Aim for the stars and at some point switch direction for the closest moon if the journey becomes too long. Aiming for the closest moon might be a good strategy in some circumstances, but if one has the capacity to aim for the stars then why not do it?
However .. I feel compelled to point out that if you're anywhere on the way to a star, you'll find yourself in an interstellar micro-vacuum with no moons in sight.
If you manage to reach a moon from there, you might as well travel the (now) insignificant distance on to the nearest star.
(I'm very sorry, I just had to point this out. Really, it was a lovely analogy.. ).
With the dot-com rise and bust, the web-2.0 rise (and already, some say, bust) and the developers, salesdroids, business suits all blogging about this kind of work constantly - there is enough material out there to make an informed decision about the risk you're taking and the challenges and pitfalls you face as well as the potential fallout if it goes bust.
This post would have been better titled 'Some developers take risks without doing their homework'.
Though a blog post isn't as bad as writing a book about it [Guy Kawasaki] :).
When listening to business advice I listen to those that have failed often; one of the best talks I have ever had was with a taxi driver who once owned an entire fleet of tourist buses but went under. Failure is often more useful to listen to than success.
Now I agree that I would prefer to only hear advice about startups by people who have tried doing it at all.
This would've been interesting a year ago, somewhere closer to the height of excitement about web2.0, multimillion venture rounds and crazy valuations. Not now, a couple of months after the collapse of the capital markets.
Giving a (web) service away and having no reliable way to turn users into paying customers is a losing game.
A product that I think is great, but which confuses me is Weebly. They have some excellent technology and offer a really awesome service, but their numbers are terrible. 1Million users and 1% paying customers! What other industry has 1% of customers supporting 99% of the rest?
I would rather have 1000 paying customers than 1Million eyeballs that are just there for the ride.
Small costs can quickly balloon when you reach figures of a million plus.
The SEO is certainly a plus, however this exposure still needs to turn into dollars in the bank if you want to keep the lights on.
why do you think of it as "giving it away"? it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user, and it's a useful, free service for most people.
how many people have argued that file sharing should be legal, or that CDs and paid music are on their way out? it's the same concept, and you have to eat your own dogfood, to some extent.
you just contradicted yourself. You're saying you don't give anything away and yet there is an associated cost to providing the service.
The holistic approach is nice, but "making people happy" doesn't pay the bills, and if you're ever looking for investors (not saying that you should) then this argument will get you laughed out of the board room.
I'm not criticizing your service - I think its great, really useful and polished. What bothers me is consumer mentality. The idea that "I'm willing to take advantage of a useful service but not willing to pay for it".
In a sense though all the free web services out there are feeding the perception that web sites are free by giving away too much. Have you ever heard of a free plumbing, or child care or any other service?
Bandwidth, storage and most importantly developer hours cost money - stop devaluing your own services!!
Personally i think that a focus on small business or enterprise software gives a much better chance of long term success (which i measure as dollars in the bank, not smiles on faces).
Love your product as well as the great tech that you have created - if I was a user I would definitely be a paying one ;)
This is the money quote from the linked David Hansson article. I personally know of five small companies that have minted multi-millionaires that have ZERO web presence for their products. I suspect discrete pursuit of an industry niche is actually the dominant path to riches, but you'd never know it if you only relied on the media and google.