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From the article: (Note: In this post I’m talking specifically about tech startups, and especially non-sales-driven tech startups) More specifically: non-sales
by ajdecon 14y ago
From the article: (Note: In this post I’m talking specifically about tech startups, and especially non-sales-driven tech startups)
More specifically: non-sales-driven tech startups with founders who don't have their own money to fund development by working with employee-programmers, directly employed or outsourced.
If you read that and thought "you can't employ that programmer, they have to be a cofounder"? Then add in the criteria that you're aiming at a "tech-heavy market", rather than building a webapp for a non-technical need.
(As an example: while I respect patio11 greatly, I suspect that the actual Bingo Card Creator webapp could have been developed by a good programmer from some decent sketches, at least in beta.)
So basically this article targets business people with little money and a "great startup idea!" that they can't build themselves. I fully believe there are a lot of those out there, but it's still a fairly narrow category...
- glimcat 14y agoGiven that he describes it as "Hello World attached to a random number generator" - quite possibly so. But it became meaningly profitable due to the design iteration and statistical marketing that followed, not to mention familiarity with its mostly nontechnical audience.
- ajdecon 14y agoCertainly, and that's why patio11 has done as well as he has. But it's an easy example of why web startups aimed at a nontechnical audience can succeed even without being terribly complex, and is a supporting point for the idea that some startups can probably succeed without a "rock star" developer.