I don't think that's actually true though. Sure, maybe if you only hang out in SF and don't know anything about business and just believe what you hear about st

I don't think that's actually true though. Sure, maybe if you only hang out in SF and don't know anything about business and just believe what you hear about startups, then you might have issues. It's better to just think about it for a while, read a lot of different success stories, advice, etc and come to your own conclusions. But come on. Business isn't rocket science. You make something useful, work out a monetization strategy, and grow from there. That's easy enough for my kids to understand. The disservice 37signals does is that they firstly only believe that a certain business model is viable (eg selling stuff directly), and secondly they suggest that it's simple for the reader to emulate 37signals, when they know full well that to do that the reader would need to create ruby on rails, build up a big readership/following, etc etc. Any extremist view is dangerous when taken literally and in isolation.