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It's a gamble. But, there are other examples of this: the company that created Slack was trying to make a successful game when they realized their internal comm
by gdubs 9y ago
It's a gamble. But, there are other examples of this: the company that created Slack was trying to make a successful game when they realized their internal comms tool was more interesting. Will Wright was making a helicopter sim when he fell in love with the game's city-building tool.
- jonny_eh 9y agoWhich he later went back to, Sim Copter
- egypturnash 9y agoNah, he finished the chopper game that Sim City grew out of. "Wright continued to develop the editor for [Raid On Bungeling Bay] as a personal toy because he enjoyed it so much. He researched urban planning and realised that others might enjoy constructing and building cities themselves. The result was a more advanced simulation that eventually became SimCity." - the Wikipedia page on RoBB, which also notes that it selling about a mullion units in Japan was a large part of what gave Wright the financial freedom to build Sim City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay
- koboll 9y agoThey also created Flickr. Both Flickr and Slack were detours to market internal tools to outside customers on the way to making a game which never actually got made. Why can't Stripe do the same thing? It's got this gigantic customer base of fledgling businesses; why not start building internal tools and then, once they're mature and battle-tested internally, offer them publicly to the growing businesses they already work with? It's an ingenious move.
- aytekin 9y agoStripe is so profitable that anything else they make will look like a joke for the first few years. It is easier to pivot from an unsuccessful product.