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A comment on Airtable Apps. Parent comment

Re:Airtable Apps by rileymat2 on Monday September 14, 2020 @06:19PM (#24475809)
An exceedingly high number of restaurants fail in the first year, an industry that has existed for centuries. And we are still opening new ones.

This is normal, there will be more and new software products.

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Re:Airtable Apps by vkou on Monday September 14, 2020 @06:30PM (#24475880)
Software, unlike restaurants, has trivial economies of scale, and colossal start-up costs.

It's much cheaper to open a restaurant, then build a word processor that someone can get value out of. It's much harder to build your restaurant chain to serve 100,000 people, then it is to scale your word processor, that can serve 100 people, to serve 100,000 people.

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Re:Airtable Apps by thebean11 on Monday September 14, 2020 @08:06PM (#24476548)
It's pretty easy to build a tool or game that a few hundred people can get value out of though right?
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Re:Airtable Apps by vkou on Monday September 14, 2020 @08:41PM (#24476729)
No, because there's this weird thing about developing apps.

If you have too few users, this means that you can't afford to eat, while too many users means that other app developers can't afford to eat.

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Re:Airtable Apps by thebean11 on Monday September 14, 2020 @10:04PM (#24477203)
The company where I work has about a hundred engineers, and a team who makes tools for those engineers. There are uncountably many small niches of software customers, whether they're external or not.
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