The key part you're ignoring is "Most significant products (e.g. Dropbox)" There's no way you could clone Dropbox's first version in anything less than 6 month

The key part you're ignoring is "Most significant products (e.g. Dropbox)" There's no way you could clone Dropbox's first version in anything less than 6 months, and that assumes you're a great programmer. It took the Dropbox team something like 18 months to publicly release, which was all paid for by funding. It required significant funding to build and to operate (freemium). reddit was also created with funding and could not have existed without funding. It made no money. I know the story of a lone developer creating a little app that takes off sounds good, but the reality is most significant projects take a good amount of time and money.