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An interesting thing is that Jeff Bezos is the only investor in 37 Signals according to that article. Amazon.com was the poster boy for "Don't worry about spend
by 9oliYQjP 17y ago
An interesting thing is that Jeff Bezos is the only investor in 37 Signals according to that article. Amazon.com was the poster boy for "Don't worry about spending money now, we'll be profitable one day" mentality. That said, most other dot com companies slightly misinterpreted this strategy. One thing that Amazon.com did differently than its counterparts which were also losing money was it pursued moderate and steady growth rather than exponential curve growth. I think we see a similar situation these days in startups. It's all about scaling up as fast as possible to millions of users. But here we have a company liked 37 Signals saying "don't worry about scalability, we'll get their one day, just throw more hardware at the problem". Scale eventually, has sort of been a 37 Signals tenet hasn't it? For all the companies pursuing functional this, and threaded-that, jumping onboard the latest greatest languages and platforms for scalability, 37 Signals and Rails is chugging along quite nicely. In fact, I bet they'd reply "What scalability problem?" if anyone were to ask, as they likely don't have one right now.
- tedunangst 17y agoThe other thing amazon did differently is actually have a revenue stream.
- rudin 17y agoGoing with the restaurant metaphor, it is a lot easier to get into profit if you have paying customers but they are losing you money, (Amazon) than if the customers are getting a free lunch. The scalability of the internet can really help with the first case while in the second it still isn't sure if you have a viable business model.