How many unpaid hours did they put in? How much stock did they give to people who also put unpaid hours in? Never mind that they could launch, fix, release, fix release, etc...

A venture with a long development tail after release is absurdly different from this. They had to get it right the first (and only) time, and no one is anticipating even a one in a million chance of getting rich off it.

Because they weren't seriously paying themselves. Nobody builds an Iowa Caucus app in the hopes of selling to a big tech company for billions of dollars.

So what? What's your point?

That they should have used Django for the backend :-)