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For me, there's about 4 months between idea and first public launch. But another 4 years between that first launch to deciding to build a company around it. The

by hugs 9y ago

For me, there's about 4 months between idea and first public launch. But another 4 years between that first launch to deciding to build a company around it. The time between 4 months and 4 years involves building a community, helping users, and improving the core product... My personal examples: Launched Selenium as an open source project in 2004. Founded Sauce Labs Inc ("Selenium in the cloud") in 2008. (Sauce makes roughly ~$25MM a year now. https://www.inc.com/profile/sauce-labs https://www.inc.com/profile/sauce-labs) Launched Tapster (then called "Bitbeambot") as an open source project in 2011. Founded Tapster Robotics, Inc. in 2015. (Not disclosing revenue at the moment, but still going strong!) To echo some other comments, I also have many other side-projects (some posted to GitHub, but even more unpublished) that never went anywhere. Success is a combination of luck, timing, ABC (Always Be Creating), stubbornness/persistence, and getting feedback from as many people as possible.

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
I run a service called Tesults for test results reporting. It's fairly new, I went from idea to first release in two months, releasing last October. I wanted it to be fast because I've spent 8-9 years launching a bunch of stuff and each one took far too long for an initial release. With Tesults I discovered users expected far more features than that first pithy release and so work has never really stopped and I think that's part of the 'improving the core product' you are referring to. I find it fascinating how little love this part of software dev can get with respect to both developer time allocation and department budgeting (hence making free to use important for most users) so Sauce Labs revenue is all the more impressive. Tapster is very cool - working on something with a cool factor like that makes it easier to get attention as I'm discovering now with a new project I'm working on (unrelated to testing).

by hugs 9y ago

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

I run a service called Tesults for test results reporting. It's fairly new, I went from idea to first release in two months, releasing last October. I wanted it to be fast because I've spent 8-9 years launching a bunch of stuff and each one took far too long for an initial release. With Tesults I discovered users expected far more features than that first pithy release and so work has never really stopped and I think that's part of the 'improving the core product' you are referring to. I find it fascinating how little love this part of software dev can get with respect to both developer time allocation and department budgeting (hence making free to use important for most users) so Sauce Labs revenue is all the more impressive. Tapster is very cool - working on something with a cool factor like that makes it easier to get attention as I'm discovering now with a new project I'm working on (unrelated to testing).