"It's not necessary to give your startup your complete attention to run it. I treated my shareware business as a part time job. Mind you, other companies that could focus attention on their competing products drove me out of business."
Did I get that right?
To paraphrase you: apologies for being a tool, but I can't help it. I bet you "know how to make Twitter scale," too. I love uninformed monday morning quarterbacks.
A full-time company would probably handle that scenario by evaluating the market and seeing how to leverage their investment. For example, if your pop-up blocker had any intelligence to it, one approach might involve building the equivalent of adblock for IE, which I suspect would sell about as well as a popup blocker pre-builtin. Then again, I'm not sure how much of a company one could expect to build around a simple pop-up blocker, so calling yourself a company is a bit of a stretch -- it's really just a hobby.
No need to apologize for being a tool, this is the Internet and it is assumed.
Anyhow, arguing with a troll is not a good use of my time, so I'm cutting this off now.
http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/06/indias-sms-gupshu...
SMS GupShup's business and technology are very different from Twitter's. SMS GS is geared towards distributing SMS's, not displaying them on pages/open API's. That makes a huge difference.
I had a shareware business that footed the bills and this was not true in my case. There was a large number of people in the Association of Shareware Professionals trade group that were in a similar position. I'm not sure it's true of web apps either. I had tons of time to develop or twiddle my thumbs.
I had freedom. Security is tougher though, as I did eventually get squashed by Google/MS.