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David's point was well-made, but this post makes a good point as well. 37signals has huge structural advantages because of the popularity of Rails and their bl
by mhartl 19y ago
David's point was well-made, but this post makes a good point as well. 37signals has huge structural advantages because of the popularity of Rails and their blog's huge audience. When you can push out your announcements to over 80,000 feed readers alone, you have an advantage few others can match.
The bottom line is that getting distribution is hard. Those who have it often forget that.
- cedsav 19y agoSure they can roll out new apps to a huge audience now, but they did not start with 80k readers. It took them years to transition from a consultancy to a SaaS model, and years to grow Basecamp and Rails. Getting distribution is not that hard, but it takes a LONG time (talking from experience).
- alaskamiller 19y agopeople seem to miss this aspect of grabbing success. 37signals took 5 years to get here. wikipedia/wiki/crowdsourcing took 8 years. craigslist took more than 13 years. success is a balanced equation, you need equal parts marketing, sales, engineering, product design, pricing, timing, and even a bit of luck to get to what you want.
- mhartl 19y agoI agree, though 'easy things that take a long time' fall into the 'hard' category as far as I'm concerned. But maybe I'm just impatient. :-)
- billroberts 19y agoThat's true, that they get a lot of publicity for their apps, but that's not an accident: they have worked hard at building up their blog and no doubt paid DHH and others for spending their time on developing open source software. Clearly 37signals realise that marketing is important - and they are good at it.