5 ms·

Developers are blinded by the light

47 points by acangiano 18y ago

giardini 18y ago
IIRC this is the second submission on HN that is a submarine SPAM article touting the Balsamiq software for developers.
- nonrecursive 18y ago
  Antonio is a reputable blogger, and this article isn't spam. Besides that, he barely mentions what Balsamiq does and doesn't even recommend anyone, much less developers, use it. You could hardly say that he's "touting" the software by mentioning it to support his point.
- balsamiq 18y ago
  I can assure you I had nothing to do with it, or any other one. In fact, I continue to be amazed at people showing me as an example...I'm just a little little company building a little little product!
edw519 18y ago
If loving a chance for success is wrong, I don't want to be right.
- lhorie 18y ago
  I think the point is not so much about whether one should take a chance or not, but more about how much risk you're willing to take when creating software.
- patio11 18y ago
  "Lottery tickets" and "boring little applications that people happily pay money for" both have a chance for success, too, if that's your thing.
kingkongrevenge 18y ago
> The quiet successes by small teams who stand little if anything to gain by sharing their numbers and telling about their success. Lest they attract competitors or other unwanted interest. This is the money quote from the linked David Hansson article. I personally know of five small companies that have minted multi-millionaires that have ZERO web presence for their products. I suspect discrete pursuit of an industry niche is actually the dominant path to riches, but you'd never know it if you only relied on the media and google.
gruseom 18y ago
Not to pick on this author in particular, but I wish I had an easy way to filter out everything said about startups by people who haven't personally done it successfully.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Agreed. Though a blog post isn't as bad as writing a book about it [Guy Kawasaki] :).
- trapper 18y ago
  Automated ad-hominem ftw. Of course only people who have [define success here] can say smart things about startups and business :)
  - gruseom 18y ago
    Is it ad hominem if I don't want to take guitar lessons from someone who can't play guitar?
    - trapper 18y ago
      Playing guitar, just like business success are subjective. I consider 37signals, youtube and balsamiq successful and they contain few common elements (except making things people want). When listening to business advice I listen to those that have failed often; one of the best talks I have ever had was with a taxi driver who once owned an entire fleet of tourist buses but went under. Failure is often more useful to listen to than success.
      - fallentimes 18y ago
        I agree, but listening to someone who has failed is different than listening to someone who has never even tried, which is what I think the OP was getting at.
      - gruseom 18y ago
        I want to hear people talk of experiences they've actually had. In the case of someone who has failed, I'm interested in hearing their reflections on how and why they failed. That's not the same as them telling me how to succeed at the thing.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
markessien 18y ago
That 'article' reads like a summary of 2008 of news.yc.
- acangiano 18y ago
  I know you didn't intend what you said to come across as being nice, but I'll take it as a compliment. :)
drinian 18y ago
Yeah, but some silicone sister (with a manager, mister) told me I got what it takes.
amix 18y ago
Personally, I don't really do it for the money or making it big. I do it because it's fun, a learning experience and exciting. And I think a lot of other developers feel the same way as I. And really, why settle with the mediocre? Aim for the stars and at some point switch direction for the closest moon if the journey becomes too long. Aiming for the closest moon might be a good strategy in some circumstances, but if one has the capacity to aim for the stars then why not do it?
- mpk 18y ago
  I agree and I like your analogy. However .. I feel compelled to point out that if you're anywhere on the way to a star, you'll find yourself in an interstellar micro-vacuum with no moons in sight. If you manage to reach a moon from there, you might as well travel the (now) insignificant distance on to the nearest star. (I'm very sorry, I just had to point this out. Really, it was a lovely analogy.. ).
  - randallsquared 18y ago
    Brown dwarfs might well have moons... unless you call them planets, I guess...
eli_s 18y ago
Great article. It really surprises me how many people are building products that rely on the "get huge then make money from advertising" model. Personally I couldn't imagine investing years on a project without a reasonable expectation of getting paying customers. Giving a (web) service away and having no reliable way to turn users into paying customers is a losing game. A product that I think is great, but which confuses me is Weebly. They have some excellent technology and offer a really awesome service, but their numbers are terrible. 1Million users and 1% paying customers! What other industry has 1% of customers supporting 99% of the rest? I would rather have 1000 paying customers than 1Million eyeballs that are just there for the ride.
- emmett 18y ago
  You wouldn't have the 1,000 paying customers without the 1,000,000 eyeballs to get them with then. It's not like it costs Weebly much to run those websites, and they essentially act as free SEO for their pay service.
  - eli_s 18y ago
    It depends which sector you target. If you make software for business users there is never an expectation that a service is free. Small costs can quickly balloon when you reach figures of a million plus. The SEO is certainly a plus, however this exposure still needs to turn into dollars in the bank if you want to keep the lights on.
- drusenko 18y ago
  there's something honestly enjoyable for us in providing a free service that is useful to people. besides the point already mentioned (that it doesn't cost us that much), we're genuinely happy that we can help people and make their lives better. if at some point you help us generate revenue, that's great, but even if you don't, we're happy that we could make your life easier -- that's our perspective. why do you think of it as "giving it away"? it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user, and it's a useful, free service for most people. how many people have argued that file sharing should be legal, or that CDs and paid music are on their way out? it's the same concept, and you have to eat your own dogfood, to some extent.
Prrometheus 18y ago
Moral of the story: you can sell a fart application for the desktop, too, even if it isn't as glamorous as a fart application for the iphone.
mpk 18y ago
This post is full of sweeping generalizations. Not all developers are working on a startup. There are also more startups out there that start without everyone being a (software) developer. Not all startups do software, for that matter. With the dot-com rise and bust, the web-2.0 rise (and already, some say, bust) and the developers, salesdroids, business suits all blogging about this kind of work constantly - there is enough material out there to make an informed decision about the risk you're taking and the challenges and pitfalls you face as well as the potential fallout if it goes bust. This post would have been better titled 'Some developers take risks without doing their homework'.
sant0sk1 18y ago
What an informative read! I always thought it was: "wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night." =]
- auston 18y ago
  That was the first thing I thought.
hassy 18y ago
You know what, it sounds like the author just read Fooled By Randomness and watched DHH's talk at Startup School 07, and then did a Jeff Atwood. This would've been interesting a year ago, somewhere closer to the height of excitement about web2.0, multimillion venture rounds and crazy valuations. Not now, a couple of months after the collapse of the capital markets.

47 points by acangiano 18y ago

giardini 18y ago

IIRC this is the second submission on HN that is a submarine SPAM article touting the Balsamiq software for developers.

nonrecursive 18y ago
Antonio is a reputable blogger, and this article isn't spam. Besides that, he barely mentions what Balsamiq does and doesn't even recommend anyone, much less developers, use it. You could hardly say that he's "touting" the software by mentioning it to support his point.
balsamiq 18y ago
I can assure you I had nothing to do with it, or any other one. In fact, I continue to be amazed at people showing me as an example...I'm just a little little company building a little little product!

edw519 18y ago

If loving a chance for success is wrong, I don't want to be right.

lhorie 18y ago
I think the point is not so much about whether one should take a chance or not, but more about how much risk you're willing to take when creating software.
patio11 18y ago
"Lottery tickets" and "boring little applications that people happily pay money for" both have a chance for success, too, if that's your thing.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago

> The quiet successes by small teams who stand little if anything to gain by sharing their numbers and telling about their success. Lest they attract competitors or other unwanted interest. This is the money quote from the linked David Hansson article. I personally know of five small companies that have minted multi-millionaires that have ZERO web presence for their products. I suspect discrete pursuit of an industry niche is actually the dominant path to riches, but you'd never know it if you only relied on the media and google.

gruseom 18y ago

Not to pick on this author in particular, but I wish I had an easy way to filter out everything said about startups by people who haven't personally done it successfully.

fallentimes 18y ago
Agreed. Though a blog post isn't as bad as writing a book about it [Guy Kawasaki] :).
trapper 18y ago
Automated ad-hominem ftw. Of course only people who have [define success here] can say smart things about startups and business :)
- gruseom 18y ago
  Is it ad hominem if I don't want to take guitar lessons from someone who can't play guitar?
  - trapper 18y ago
    Playing guitar, just like business success are subjective. I consider 37signals, youtube and balsamiq successful and they contain few common elements (except making things people want). When listening to business advice I listen to those that have failed often; one of the best talks I have ever had was with a taxi driver who once owned an entire fleet of tourist buses but went under. Failure is often more useful to listen to than success.
    - fallentimes 18y ago
      I agree, but listening to someone who has failed is different than listening to someone who has never even tried, which is what I think the OP was getting at.
    - gruseom 18y ago
      I want to hear people talk of experiences they've actually had. In the case of someone who has failed, I'm interested in hearing their reflections on how and why they failed. That's not the same as them telling me how to succeed at the thing.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

markessien 18y ago

That 'article' reads like a summary of 2008 of news.yc.

acangiano 18y ago
I know you didn't intend what you said to come across as being nice, but I'll take it as a compliment. :)

drinian 18y ago

Yeah, but some silicone sister (with a manager, mister) told me I got what it takes.

amix 18y ago

Personally, I don't really do it for the money or making it big. I do it because it's fun, a learning experience and exciting. And I think a lot of other developers feel the same way as I. And really, why settle with the mediocre? Aim for the stars and at some point switch direction for the closest moon if the journey becomes too long. Aiming for the closest moon might be a good strategy in some circumstances, but if one has the capacity to aim for the stars then why not do it?

mpk 18y ago
I agree and I like your analogy. However .. I feel compelled to point out that if you're anywhere on the way to a star, you'll find yourself in an interstellar micro-vacuum with no moons in sight. If you manage to reach a moon from there, you might as well travel the (now) insignificant distance on to the nearest star. (I'm very sorry, I just had to point this out. Really, it was a lovely analogy.. ).
- randallsquared 18y ago
  Brown dwarfs might well have moons... unless you call them planets, I guess...

eli_s 18y ago

Great article. It really surprises me how many people are building products that rely on the "get huge then make money from advertising" model. Personally I couldn't imagine investing years on a project without a reasonable expectation of getting paying customers. Giving a (web) service away and having no reliable way to turn users into paying customers is a losing game. A product that I think is great, but which confuses me is Weebly. They have some excellent technology and offer a really awesome service, but their numbers are terrible. 1Million users and 1% paying customers! What other industry has 1% of customers supporting 99% of the rest? I would rather have 1000 paying customers than 1Million eyeballs that are just there for the ride.

emmett 18y ago
You wouldn't have the 1,000 paying customers without the 1,000,000 eyeballs to get them with then. It's not like it costs Weebly much to run those websites, and they essentially act as free SEO for their pay service.
- eli_s 18y ago
  It depends which sector you target. If you make software for business users there is never an expectation that a service is free. Small costs can quickly balloon when you reach figures of a million plus. The SEO is certainly a plus, however this exposure still needs to turn into dollars in the bank if you want to keep the lights on.
drusenko 18y ago
there's something honestly enjoyable for us in providing a free service that is useful to people. besides the point already mentioned (that it doesn't cost us that much), we're genuinely happy that we can help people and make their lives better. if at some point you help us generate revenue, that's great, but even if you don't, we're happy that we could make your life easier -- that's our perspective. why do you think of it as "giving it away"? it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user, and it's a useful, free service for most people. how many people have argued that file sharing should be legal, or that CDs and paid music are on their way out? it's the same concept, and you have to eat your own dogfood, to some extent.

Prrometheus 18y ago

Moral of the story: you can sell a fart application for the desktop, too, even if it isn't as glamorous as a fart application for the iphone.

mpk 18y ago

This post is full of sweeping generalizations. Not all developers are working on a startup. There are also more startups out there that start without everyone being a (software) developer. Not all startups do software, for that matter. With the dot-com rise and bust, the web-2.0 rise (and already, some say, bust) and the developers, salesdroids, business suits all blogging about this kind of work constantly - there is enough material out there to make an informed decision about the risk you're taking and the challenges and pitfalls you face as well as the potential fallout if it goes bust. This post would have been better titled 'Some developers take risks without doing their homework'.

sant0sk1 18y ago

What an informative read! I always thought it was: "wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night." =]

auston 18y ago
That was the first thing I thought.

hassy 18y ago

You know what, it sounds like the author just read Fooled By Randomness and watched DHH's talk at Startup School 07, and then did a Jeff Atwood. This would've been interesting a year ago, somewhere closer to the height of excitement about web2.0, multimillion venture rounds and crazy valuations. Not now, a couple of months after the collapse of the capital markets.