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> It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful. I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful vers

> It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful. I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful versions of my own creations. I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database. It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software. These types of companies seem to make more money than I do. Yet at the same time, in the marketing companies that come to my mind, the weaknesses in their products tend to be sustainability. I think overtime customers are going to become frustrated with their lack of good support and ability to maintain code and add new features. Just my thoughts when reflecting on all of this. :)

ensiferum 10y ago
As an engineer I find it an appalling when you realize that quality engineering means nothing in terms of financial success. I used to think that if you build a quality product the users will pick it up and it will become successful when in fact it couldn't be further away from reality. Thus, bugs and quality are secondary. Why spend $ on engineering and fixing bugs when you can spend that on marketing for much better ROI.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- x1798DE 10y ago
  I'm willing to entertain that this is true, but it's also possible that the companies that sacrifice good engineering are setting themselves up for big costs later, like, for example, if someone uses one of your security holes to destroy your site and you can't easily fix them because they are so numerous. It could also presumably cause major scaling problems (if you are lucky enough to have that problem), which could impede growth significantly at a critical time. That said, as someone who highly values a well built product, this may be wishful thinking.
  - throwawayReply 10y ago
    That's the geek fantasy: that a security vuln will take BigCorp to their knees and they'll finally accept how important it was. But the reality is that companies are getting pwned over and over and nothing bad happens to them. Actually looking at cost-benefit it still makes sense to get to market quickly.
    - XparXnoiAx 10y ago
      Time for some irresponsible disclosure: https://medium.com/@xParXnoiAx/irresponsible-disclosure-52d08cddcd07 https://medium.com/@xParXnoiAx/irresponsible-disclosure-52d0...
      - hasenj 10y ago
        Very provocative!
      - can09 10y ago
        An interesting counter-point, but rather poorly written, and far too short. You need to flesh your ideas and accusations out properly, and your ending line makes for a lazy and frankly rather pathetic conclusion. You should invest a lot more time into editing and review.
        XparXnoiAx 10y ago
        Doesn't matter if it is long or short, as long as people understand it.
        eropple 10y ago
        It matters if you're actually formulating an argument. I understand what you are saying and am unmoved. Preaching to your choir is amateurish.
        XparXnoiAx 10y ago
- joshaidan 10y ago
  Yeah I totally agree. Personally I want to find a way to do both. Build a great product that's well marketed. If anything, when you build something great, don't totally ignore the marketing side of things like I often do. I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.
- rahoulb 10y ago
  As ever it depends. To use the ever-present car analogy, shoddy engineering didn't harm British Leyland - until it did. And now there's no native British car industry to speak of. But people don't care about engineering - they care about how your product will affect their lives today. If you can prove to them that it will solve that problem they have, they don't care that it's made out of biscuits.
- jsonne 10y ago
  I would encourage you to think os engineering as a necessary but insufficient state for a company to thrive. At the end of the day you still need a functional product that solves a real problem in a novel way. Even the best marketer in the world can't hold a gun to people's heads and force them to buy.
- afarrell 10y ago
  With marketplaces in general, it is not about what you know, it is about who trusts you to reliably solve their problems. Often, that requires the technical skills to reliably solve their problems. Always, that requires the communication skills to pursuade someone you can solve their problems.
- jwblackwell 10y ago
  It's not even about marketing, just building something of actual value. I doubt this girl has spent much if anything on marketing.
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  I encourage you to stop thinking about the world in binary terms. how much engineering matters for financial success is a continuous function of several parameters. It's never about either not mattering at all or mattering 100%
  - gumby 10y ago
    I agree, and to carry it a little further: the essence of engineering is good tradeoffs (can I build an adequate bridge for the needed cost? If I can carry more cargo in this plane, can I make the fuel requirement grow linearly or better? zip we cut the range 10% we can cut the op ex 20% -- will that still work? Do I really need to spec precision resistors or can I compensate somewhere else? The trade off skills apply outside the engineering domain as well.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Except with engineering you're often dealing with non-monetary tradeoffs. The plane serves a valuable purpose outside of making someone some money. The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others.
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
        > The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others I don't think a blanket put-down of all marketing as negative value is really true. Of course there are instances where marketing is dishonest or harmful, but by and large, how do you expect people to discover goods and services if there isn't someone who's willing to pay for the cost of dissemination of information, whether it's a marketer, or Google's search algorithm, or the consumer?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing. The cost of telling people about a product/service should obviously be paid by the product/service provider - but we've solved that thing with a printing press, in the form of yellow pages and newspaper classifieds. Google's costs per company indexed are probably even cheaper. Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I learned this the hard way when I moved from a company that sold software to the manufacturing / health industries. Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality, what matters is that at the end of the it delivers the outputs the actual business requires. So beware of presenting prototypes in such industries, their are always the final product and code refactoring is not something that usually makes them sell more stuff from their actual products. Also the code tends to be pretty horrible, because a lot is developed by external companies that usually tend to implement a just single set of features. It is almost impossible to write properly safe code, because no external is able to grasp the whole codebase in the required timeframes for delivering the new feature and leave to another customer.
  - gerbilly 10y ago
    >Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality And increasingly, because of the 'go fast a break things' attitude, this is extending to companies that _do_ sell software.
- koonsolo 10y ago
  You know what an awesome product is? It's full of bugs, lacks features and is frustrating to work with. Yet customers are ready to pay money for it. You know why? Because despite all the quality issues, it solves their problem.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle
  - mhurron 10y ago
    That's pretty much exactly what the OP said. A completly shitty product that does just enough that people over look how shitty it is because it 'works' for them. Once it becomes embedded it doesn't even matter if someone comes along with a product that also solves their problem without the bugs and annoyances, because 'they do the same thing.' so why switch. Engineering quality really doesn't mean much to people, so stop worrying so much about it once the core works without killing the user.
- helthanatos 10y ago
  Just look at all the bugs and unfulfilled promises in games released. They make a ton of money, but as much or more money goes into marketing than into the programming.
  - Retra 10y ago
    That's because they're selling the experience of hype, not high-quality software. Nobody even cares about software quality for games. Some people even prefer buggy ones.
    - helthanatos 10y ago
      To an extent. I like buggy games if they let me "cheat" in the game, as long as it's single player and the game is finished besides bugs. For multiplayer, there should be no bugs or exploits and those should be fixed immediately. Honestly, I hate hype and would prefer people to stop spreading hype and promises from the devs that they may have forgotten about. I would prefer devs and designers to be the ones leading game development, not publishers that want them "as fast as possible." That mentality needs to stop and games need to possess more intention than being a semifun money grab.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  they're not secondary, they just need to be sufficient. think of the extremes; you could develop a technical masterpiece and keep it under covers, making $0, having spent every single bit of available time/money/resources on it. that's a hobby, not a business.
- actuallyalys 10y ago
  There's something to be said for making something you're proud of, even if the higher quality doesn't translate to more profit.
- thisisit 10y ago
  I recommend watching Silicon Valley a HBO series which in my opinion is geared towards engineers. They have covered this topic very succinctly. Engineering or rather sometimes over-engineering things might make it super easy but not intuitive to use.
jsonne 10y ago
"It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software." Many people do this already and it's a highly competitive space. Stories like this are neat because it seems like a lot of money (and it is for a 16 year old), but many of these things are too small to fit into a marketing agency model to make them worthwhile.
new299 10y ago
I came across a really ugly and badly engineered PCB the other day and it prompted me into coming to the same conclusion: http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/ http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/ If the engineering solution is good enough (for the customer) there are other things that matter more, mostly marketing, sales and customer support.
quirkafleeg 10y ago
> I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database. Ironically, unless they're doing a side business in Microsoft product keys, specialname.cn was hacked until at least a couple of hours ago (according to Google's cache). http://archive.is/FLd2M http://archive.is/FLd2M
baby 10y ago
My thoughts as well. IMO, any successful company needs to spend some money in illustrations, designs, presentation, etc...

ensiferum 10y ago

As an engineer I find it an appalling when you realize that quality engineering means nothing in terms of financial success. I used to think that if you build a quality product the users will pick it up and it will become successful when in fact it couldn't be further away from reality. Thus, bugs and quality are secondary. Why spend $ on engineering and fixing bugs when you can spend that on marketing for much better ROI.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
x1798DE 10y ago
I'm willing to entertain that this is true, but it's also possible that the companies that sacrifice good engineering are setting themselves up for big costs later, like, for example, if someone uses one of your security holes to destroy your site and you can't easily fix them because they are so numerous. It could also presumably cause major scaling problems (if you are lucky enough to have that problem), which could impede growth significantly at a critical time. That said, as someone who highly values a well built product, this may be wishful thinking.
- throwawayReply 10y ago
  That's the geek fantasy: that a security vuln will take BigCorp to their knees and they'll finally accept how important it was. But the reality is that companies are getting pwned over and over and nothing bad happens to them. Actually looking at cost-benefit it still makes sense to get to market quickly.
  - XparXnoiAx 10y ago
    Time for some irresponsible disclosure: https://medium.com/@xParXnoiAx/irresponsible-disclosure-52d08cddcd07 https://medium.com/@xParXnoiAx/irresponsible-disclosure-52d0...
    - hasenj 10y ago
      Very provocative!
    - can09 10y ago
      An interesting counter-point, but rather poorly written, and far too short. You need to flesh your ideas and accusations out properly, and your ending line makes for a lazy and frankly rather pathetic conclusion. You should invest a lot more time into editing and review.
      - XparXnoiAx 10y ago
        Doesn't matter if it is long or short, as long as people understand it.
        eropple 10y ago
        It matters if you're actually formulating an argument. I understand what you are saying and am unmoved. Preaching to your choir is amateurish.
        XparXnoiAx 10y ago
joshaidan 10y ago
Yeah I totally agree. Personally I want to find a way to do both. Build a great product that's well marketed. If anything, when you build something great, don't totally ignore the marketing side of things like I often do. I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.
rahoulb 10y ago
As ever it depends. To use the ever-present car analogy, shoddy engineering didn't harm British Leyland - until it did. And now there's no native British car industry to speak of. But people don't care about engineering - they care about how your product will affect their lives today. If you can prove to them that it will solve that problem they have, they don't care that it's made out of biscuits.
jsonne 10y ago
I would encourage you to think os engineering as a necessary but insufficient state for a company to thrive. At the end of the day you still need a functional product that solves a real problem in a novel way. Even the best marketer in the world can't hold a gun to people's heads and force them to buy.
afarrell 10y ago
With marketplaces in general, it is not about what you know, it is about who trusts you to reliably solve their problems. Often, that requires the technical skills to reliably solve their problems. Always, that requires the communication skills to pursuade someone you can solve their problems.
jwblackwell 10y ago
It's not even about marketing, just building something of actual value. I doubt this girl has spent much if anything on marketing.
vasilipupkin 10y ago
I encourage you to stop thinking about the world in binary terms. how much engineering matters for financial success is a continuous function of several parameters. It's never about either not mattering at all or mattering 100%
- gumby 10y ago
  I agree, and to carry it a little further: the essence of engineering is good tradeoffs (can I build an adequate bridge for the needed cost? If I can carry more cargo in this plane, can I make the fuel requirement grow linearly or better? zip we cut the range 10% we can cut the op ex 20% -- will that still work? Do I really need to spec precision resistors or can I compensate somewhere else? The trade off skills apply outside the engineering domain as well.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Except with engineering you're often dealing with non-monetary tradeoffs. The plane serves a valuable purpose outside of making someone some money. The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      > The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others I don't think a blanket put-down of all marketing as negative value is really true. Of course there are instances where marketing is dishonest or harmful, but by and large, how do you expect people to discover goods and services if there isn't someone who's willing to pay for the cost of dissemination of information, whether it's a marketer, or Google's search algorithm, or the consumer?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing. The cost of telling people about a product/service should obviously be paid by the product/service provider - but we've solved that thing with a printing press, in the form of yellow pages and newspaper classifieds. Google's costs per company indexed are probably even cheaper. Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.
pjmlp 10y ago
I learned this the hard way when I moved from a company that sold software to the manufacturing / health industries. Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality, what matters is that at the end of the it delivers the outputs the actual business requires. So beware of presenting prototypes in such industries, their are always the final product and code refactoring is not something that usually makes them sell more stuff from their actual products. Also the code tends to be pretty horrible, because a lot is developed by external companies that usually tend to implement a just single set of features. It is almost impossible to write properly safe code, because no external is able to grasp the whole codebase in the required timeframes for delivering the new feature and leave to another customer.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  >Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality And increasingly, because of the 'go fast a break things' attitude, this is extending to companies that _do_ sell software.
koonsolo 10y ago
You know what an awesome product is? It's full of bugs, lacks features and is frustrating to work with. Yet customers are ready to pay money for it. You know why? Because despite all the quality issues, it solves their problem.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle
- mhurron 10y ago
  That's pretty much exactly what the OP said. A completly shitty product that does just enough that people over look how shitty it is because it 'works' for them. Once it becomes embedded it doesn't even matter if someone comes along with a product that also solves their problem without the bugs and annoyances, because 'they do the same thing.' so why switch. Engineering quality really doesn't mean much to people, so stop worrying so much about it once the core works without killing the user.
helthanatos 10y ago
Just look at all the bugs and unfulfilled promises in games released. They make a ton of money, but as much or more money goes into marketing than into the programming.
- Retra 10y ago
  That's because they're selling the experience of hype, not high-quality software. Nobody even cares about software quality for games. Some people even prefer buggy ones.
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    To an extent. I like buggy games if they let me "cheat" in the game, as long as it's single player and the game is finished besides bugs. For multiplayer, there should be no bugs or exploits and those should be fixed immediately. Honestly, I hate hype and would prefer people to stop spreading hype and promises from the devs that they may have forgotten about. I would prefer devs and designers to be the ones leading game development, not publishers that want them "as fast as possible." That mentality needs to stop and games need to possess more intention than being a semifun money grab.
beachstartup 10y ago
they're not secondary, they just need to be sufficient. think of the extremes; you could develop a technical masterpiece and keep it under covers, making $0, having spent every single bit of available time/money/resources on it. that's a hobby, not a business.
actuallyalys 10y ago
There's something to be said for making something you're proud of, even if the higher quality doesn't translate to more profit.
thisisit 10y ago
I recommend watching Silicon Valley a HBO series which in my opinion is geared towards engineers. They have covered this topic very succinctly. Engineering or rather sometimes over-engineering things might make it super easy but not intuitive to use.

jsonne 10y ago

"It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software." Many people do this already and it's a highly competitive space. Stories like this are neat because it seems like a lot of money (and it is for a 16 year old), but many of these things are too small to fit into a marketing agency model to make them worthwhile.

new299 10y ago

I came across a really ugly and badly engineered PCB the other day and it prompted me into coming to the same conclusion: http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/ http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/ If the engineering solution is good enough (for the customer) there are other things that matter more, mostly marketing, sales and customer support.

quirkafleeg 10y ago

> I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database. Ironically, unless they're doing a side business in Microsoft product keys, specialname.cn was hacked until at least a couple of hours ago (according to Google's cache). http://archive.is/FLd2M http://archive.is/FLd2M

baby 10y ago

My thoughts as well. IMO, any successful company needs to spend some money in illustrations, designs, presentation, etc...