Comments on: Developers are blinded by the light

By: Randy

Randy — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:00:18 +0000

In other words, why make billions, when we can make millions!

By: links for 2009-01-05 « pabloidz

links for 2009-01-05 « pabloidz — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:01:26 +0000

[…] Developers are blinded by the light Zen and the Art of Programming (tags: career) […]

By: Bob Benedict

Bob Benedict — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:56:29 +0000

Great post! The guy who started Balsamiq is a friend of mine from Adobe and I was pleased to read here he is doing so well. He’s a smart guy who is very passionate about what he does. You should see the photos of him playing Ultimate when he was younger.

And that is my point about developers and startups. Antonio is right that you can’t just sit down and create a company to make you rich over night. Instead, ask yourself this. If you are going to spend the next 3 years working extremely hard and spending all of your time on a single purpose, shouldn’t it be on something you really want to do? Would that really be making a new way for people to share photos and messages over the Web? Do we need another site to sell something? Nothing is more rewarding that coming up with a great new idea that other people like, use, admire and ultimately try to emulate.

I think 2009 should be the year of the new idea!

By: Sigi

Sigi — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:49:51 +0000

David H. Hansson is making a similar argument in one of his talks which can be watched here:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08

Well worth viewing (like most of his talks, actually).

By: James Hofmann

James Hofmann — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:26:38 +0000

I think there are two things making it difficult for developers to make a profitable decision.

The first one is the human tendency to jump for the money by cranking something out quickly. “Web 2.0” as a whole generally suffers from that. The idea of a startup being able to make quality software in a month or two of work has led to….a lot of arrogant startups that either limit their scope drastically (leading to a non-useful product) or get humbled after crunching for a few months straight. It also leads to gold rush mentality – for example, the current rush to saturate the iPhone. Yes, there is a new market open for developers. But your chances are best in the market YOU chose to specialize in. That could be a new market. Or it could be one you’ve worked in before.

The second one is sort of the opposite extreme – being engrossed in the technical world and not knowing where to stop and build a business. The idea of building platforms, frameworks, or other massive challenges. These are the things that Google, Yahoo Facebook, etc. put out after they became larger companies. If you are starting out and have no or few employees, you can’t expect to make any sort of platform. You can make something focused and popular and grow from there, though, and that’s exactly what those companies did.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:58:54 +0000

I think a lot of this depends upon the start-up and the reasons behind why they have built the website.

Let’s go back in time a little…

Why build another Search Engine? We have Yahoo, Alta-Vista, Hotdog etc. Walk in Google…Why? Because Yahoo couldn’t even search for “itself”. An obvious need for something that worked better than what was already out there.

Why build another Social Network? We have Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. Walk in nobody yet…Why? Because the current Social Networks are adequate at what they do. They allow people to socialise at a level they are comfortable with.

However, there is something different about both what Google and Facebook have done. They have become platforms. Developers can “bolt their applications” into Google Maps, Facebook Apps etc.

When you have a platform, then a whole new movement of applications come to surface. In order to build on those platforms, you need something that interacts with them (search for a product+map, share a video+facebook user).

The best thing about these platforms is that you can build a sub-network that slots into the bigger social networks. If your sub-network works, then you can grow the user base much, much quicker than through something like adsense on Google search.

The bigger the user base, the larger the crowd you have to source your next killer business idea. Crowdsourcing is changing everything and in order to source an idea, you need a crowd, in order to build a crowd, you need either a large social network or a #1 search engine.

Why give it away for free instead of charging for it? Take a look at the opensource movement. Get good at a particular opensource product and you can earn a living from it. The crowd takes the product forward in a democratic direction, you earn by being skilled in your particular niche.

There is room for both models you have both argued against and for. There will always be winners and losers. The losers are usually always the ones that are chasing a bandwagon that has already left, that are looking for a huge payback from doing very little. The winners are usually always the ones that either create the bandwagon or improve upon it by listening to the crowd…

There’s my New Year’s eve rant over for now 🙂

Happy New Year everyone !!!

By: phuesler

phuesler — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:42:52 +0000

Good write.

I’ve seen a faire share of startups whose business model is to be bought or to make money with ads. So they aim to get a large user base. At the end of the day, they make little to no money, even worse, they lose money with every new user.

I mean are facebook, myspace, youtube et al profitable? I somehow doubt that.

By: Harry

Harry — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:09:35 +0000

Liked your opening para /very/ much 🙂
It’s true and written beautifully too.
/HS

By: Jim Maher

Jim Maher — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:26:27 +0000

A related idea is to charge people only what you need to charge, rather than what you believe the “market will bear”. A lone developer CAN and SHOULD create viable application software. They should then sell that application software – cheap – as many times as possible.

Many developers work on staff for < $100K per year. Many more work as consultants for slightly more. Let’s average that out to $50 / hour. If you spend 500 hours building a small but viable app, you should expect to get paid $25,000 – eventually. How many copies will you sell? Maybe 100, if it’s sorta viable. But if it’s really useful and elegant, you ought to sell at least 1000 – eventually. What’s the right price?

I’ll argue that the right price for such an app is $25.

The benefits you’ll gain exceed the sales revenue. You’ll learn lots about building an app that people actually want. Your second one will be better – and will sell more. Your 10th one might be a winner and make some real money.

But – don’t quit your day job until your 20th takes off.

That’s how to make a living – rather than a killing – writing apps.

j

By: Bernard

Bernard — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:30:51 +0000

I had the same thought last year when for the third time a ‘global market’ application I was working on was going to be competing with many other similar apps by the time it was ready. Instead I looked for a niche that would enable me to make a good living and stop trying to win the lottery. The downturn hadn’t even happened, but I decided that it was just too big a risk to rely on advertising revenue to fund my life.