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In a perfect world it's fantastic to test out new ideas in this manner. In actual practice, this is the top method for producing vaporware.

lotyrin 9y ago
Can you imagine being the first tech hire in a company that started this way? "We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X" "Well... Google Sheets duct-taped to Zapier duct-taped to Twilio can't support X, so the first step to get X is to re-implement features A through... uh.. W by prototyping, producing, and testing some actual software product as well as a big migration... so..." or doing any debugging of intermittent delivery failures between third-party systems with a customer dogging you for updates...
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  I've been there more than once. Interviewed for a "CTO" position at a startup that had made national news with an "automated trading platform" for a high end, niche product. Turned out it was just a WordPress site and the owner was manually moving numbers around in the admin section. I said that we had to build the thing for real, and he replied, "I'm just looking for someone to take over the WordPress work."
- dagw 9y ago
  We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X Heh. Company I used to work for almost bought that contract. Based on what we read on their homepage and some initial talks the thing they where selling was perfect for us and we were basically ready to cut them a check for $~10-20k and possibly quite a lot more over time. However the more we talked with them and the more we started asking to actually be allowed to test the full capabilities of what they where promising the more it became obvious that they where full of shit. Eventually they just admitted to us that they'd straight up lied on their homepage. The funny thing was that they then asked if we wanted to become investors in their company so that they could afford to possibly build the thing they had been trying to sell us.

lotyrin 9y ago

Can you imagine being the first tech hire in a company that started this way? "We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X" "Well... Google Sheets duct-taped to Zapier duct-taped to Twilio can't support X, so the first step to get X is to re-implement features A through... uh.. W by prototyping, producing, and testing some actual software product as well as a big migration... so..." or doing any debugging of intermittent delivery failures between third-party systems with a customer dogging you for updates...

fortythirteen 9y ago
I've been there more than once. Interviewed for a "CTO" position at a startup that had made national news with an "automated trading platform" for a high end, niche product. Turned out it was just a WordPress site and the owner was manually moving numbers around in the admin section. I said that we had to build the thing for real, and he replied, "I'm just looking for someone to take over the WordPress work."
dagw 9y ago
We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X Heh. Company I used to work for almost bought that contract. Based on what we read on their homepage and some initial talks the thing they where selling was perfect for us and we were basically ready to cut them a check for $~10-20k and possibly quite a lot more over time. However the more we talked with them and the more we started asking to actually be allowed to test the full capabilities of what they where promising the more it became obvious that they where full of shit. Eventually they just admitted to us that they'd straight up lied on their homepage. The funny thing was that they then asked if we wanted to become investors in their company so that they could afford to possibly build the thing they had been trying to sell us.