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.<p>The bottom line is that <i>getting distribution is hard</i>. Those who have it often forget that.
Good point.<p>So I won't try to market my line of small business software.<p>Instead, I'll just promote the fact that it's so sophisticated, it could only be written in a brand new language that I had to create myself: eJavaLisPython++.
While this point is true, it is moot to DHH's advice. Why?<p>Because marketing plays the same roll whether you are trying
to build the next Facebook or simply gain a couple thousand paying customers. It has to be there, and its gonna take time and effort.<p>As DHH points out in the comments of the post, the final line references a mathematical error and not a fantasy world .
Misses the point.<p>Ultimately, we as internet developers need to start thinking about charging customers. I'm always talking with friends about how applications are moving from the desktop online. And some of those applications best fit some sort of pay for use model. How to get users is one thing, but that wasn't DHH's point.
I'm unsure how this is different than any other business, whether online or brick-and-mortar.<p>He says right in the presentation: this is not guaranteed to work. You still have an uphill battle; the general wisdom is that three out of every four businesses started in the US fail within their first year.<p>However... your odds of creating a profitable company based on a sound business model are far better than the odds of you building a startup with an insane burn rate and surviving long enough (and creating a service useful enough) to have a liquidity event.
Um, those weren't 37Singals' numbers he was putting up on the screen, you can bet on that. The difference between that and what 37 Signals makes is what can be attributed to marketing, yes.<p>Saying that they are wholly dependent on marketing to be profitable at all is a little much though.