Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff.<p>You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud standards" in order to succeed.<p>You just need to market it and promote it right.<p>I'm not even sarcastic or anything.
As a techie I always frickin overlook it and this is the single most important element that can help you make serious money/business.<p>There's a whole bunch of people out there who don't know shit or don't really care about how great your product is technically (or not ;> ). All you need is it satisfies some basic "need" and a shiny packaging, it's enough to go out there and get some milk flowing in.<p>Kudos to the DO folk!