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A comment on 1000 True Fans? Try 100. Parent comment

Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by onion2k on Friday February 07, 2020 @03:14AM (#22264090)
The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit.

The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by sokoloff on Friday February 07, 2020 @05:47AM (#22264793)
This seems to me like it does happen fairly often. It’s the entire model of JetBrains, RedGate, Sublime, Atlassian, etc.
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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by frosted-flakes on Friday February 07, 2020 @07:47AM (#22265434)
Adobe is a big one. The Creative Cloud suite is over $600 annually.
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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by bcrosby95 on Friday February 07, 2020 @07:28AM (#22265327)
Yep, and JetBrains has a pricing structure to roughly represent that. Individual license for intellij is $150. Organization license is $500.
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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by auggierose on Friday February 07, 2020 @03:43AM (#22264214)
I think there are plenty of cases. Just sell your software instead of giving it away.
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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by tomnipotent on Friday February 07, 2020 @12:08PM (#22268136)
> The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).

Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.

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Re:1000 True Fans? Try 100 by shanecleveland on Friday February 07, 2020 @03:00PM (#22270225)
I agree that this can be very attainable as a B2B developer. The main challenges are both knowing and understanding the problem and solution and then attracting the audience. It's doable and is being done. We hear more about the unicorns. But there is still a lot of room for the little guys.
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