Well said. I’ll take this one step further: Anyone who starts a business without putting profitability as one of the top priorities is going to have a hard time.

In fact, it can be disappointing to some engineers to learn how much starting a business requires using off-the-shelf solutions instead of rolling your own implementation and even making compromises with “good enough” code to get things shipped. The entrepreneurs who want to design and code every part of the system by themselves and only ship it when it’s absolutely perfect are the ones who struggle to ever ship a product and get customers.

Social media, HN included, has perhaps skewed public perceptions about things like money, profit, capitalism, and nebulous concepts like “passion”. There’s nothing wrong with starting a business as a business and treating the code as business decisions. In fact, it’s what you want to do if your goal is to get customers and make profit, and there’s nothing wrong with that.