"If you build it they will come" doesn't quite work on the internet. Except maybe if your product is extraordinary. But before the internet, when it's just you in your parents' basement? Then you need a real marketing channel otherwise you stand no chance. Even the Id guys had to write shareware games for an established distributor before they figured out how to do the shareware thing.

Today you can bootstrap a business worth millions based on a $8 a month VPS. As far as I can tell this hasn't been true in any other part of history or in any other field. There is still so much low-hanging fruit in software - it's crazy.

This is why mediocre products with mediocre marketing make bank. The games industry is very competitive, and so is the iOS app market. But that's only a tiny percentage of the software market (measured in dollars). Where are the thousands of Gmail competitors? Word processing and spreadsheet competitors? Where is a better DabbleDB? Nothing has changed in the past 5 years, and in any of these markets you can simply win with a better product and half-decent marketing. And if you make a product for a specific vertical it's even easier.

It's not like Patio11 is the first guy to ever make Appointment Reminder software. Or the 20th. But with half-decent execution and half-decent marketing he's still making a ton of money. And is he afraid that by posting on HN people here are going to start competing AR software? Of course not. Because there are so many better opportunities out there that there is no need to fight for the same customers.

How many startups do we see coming from Spain, or India, or Brazil? Very few. How many from Milwaukee? I don't know of any. But the software engineers exist. The opportunities are right here for the taking. But people just don't take them.

"Half-decent marketing"? I think you are selling Patrick short. Based on his vague hints about what people pay him to consult on their marketing, I don't think "half-decent" quite covers it. I'm halfway to decent, and empirically people don't pay me a quarter of that.

> How many startups do we see coming from Spain, or India, or Brazil? Very few. How many from Milwaukee? I don't know of any. But the software engineers exist. The opportunities are right here for the taking. But people just don't take them.

Doesn't it seem implausible that these people take all the other opportunities that are offered to them, but just not these ones? Isn't the more likely explanation that you have an exaggerated idea of how accessible this stuff is to most people?

But you are underestimating by a lot the costs and risks of software development, for example, a spreadsheet competitor. Not only from the software development side but also from the marketing/sales perspective. If you analyze an established software company the work force in software development and marketing/sales are evenly distributed and this is not because companies love to make advertisements, events, etc but because is how (currently) the business world works: you compete in an attention economy and this costs millions.

Another thing that you are underestimating is that Internet makes much easier things that were impossible or time consuming just a decade ago but "everyone" is competing in a new league and that advantage will be capitalized by "everyone".

2. Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.

3. When a ton of money is spent on marketing then that is strong evidence for lack of competition. After all, all money spent on marketing would otherwise go directly to the bottom line. This is why restaurants (fierce competition) spend almost nothing on marketing. They can't afford to. Fierce competition => low margins => no marketing budget. Reality: mediocre products and tons of marketing.

4. The advantages of the internet are not capitalized on by everybody, as I've been saying. The opportunity is there, but people still have to take it.

This is because it's a sucker's game. You can build the best spreadsheet in the world and Microsoft will still eat your lunch. The expected returns on a goldfish-selling business are higher. LibreOffice can't even manage to give away a tenth as many as Microsoft sells. Like, yes, building a spreadsheet program is something people could do, but it is not an idea with even the remotest possibility of making good money.

I think I have figured out the fundamental disconnect here. You are talking about how easy it is to build stuff these days, while other people are talking about how easy it is to make a living off stuff. It is easy to build things. But building something alone is pure cost, no profit. Then the hard part comes. The difficulty has just shifted around, not disappeared.

3) No, just the contrary. Try yourself to gain traction with a free open source software and see how difficult it is.

4) That's what I said but it's being capitalized by a lot of people

1) Startups and small business are popping up everywhere and the majority die.

So maybe launching a general Excel competitor is a pretty daunting task because you're going up against the gorilla of the market. Targeting a specific subset of its user base can still make for a viable business.

Where are the thousands of Gmail competitors?

The reason they don't exist (or they do exist but you never hear about them) is that you'll have to pry Gmail from people's cold dead hands. Firstly, Gmail is an amazing product, and it would be really, really, really hard to do better. Very few teams can attempt such a thing, certainly not thousands. Secondly, even if you build a better product, it's extremely unclear how it would be enough better to get enough people to leave Gmail.

Word processing and spreadsheet competitors?

Exactly the same reason. Microsoft Office is an amazing piece of software, and it would be immensely difficult to do better. Furthermore the barrier to entry is huge -- word processing and spreadsheet software that can effectively compete with MS Office would take decades to build.

There is something to be said for competing with Google's online office offerings (and I know some really smart people who are doing just that), but again, it's not as easy as it seems.

Where is a better DabbleDB?

DabbleDB didn't work as a business. That's why there is no better DabbleDB -- there is no market for it.

I don't think it's so much that there's no market for it as that the market is very hard to reach and we had no good channel. Intuit's Quickbase is a very healthy business, because they have a channel to millions of SMBs. We didn't, and didn't know how to build one, so we grew much more slowly (though I should say that by most sane, non-valley standards we were doing just fine, thanks ;)

I learned a lot of things at Dabble, but I think the biggest lesson was that the three most important things in B2B software are distribution, distribution, and distribution.

Or maybe they're targeting local customers, just like most(?) American startups.

There is saying, if you can make it in NY, you can make it anywhere. That quip is related to competition, and in my opinion anywhere is becoming just like NY.

This

It was not difficult to program in the 80s, 90s. But to get the information you needed, oh wow, that was tough.

In the US it was certainly easier, but unfortunately it's not as easy in some other countries. And yes, there were magazines, etc. Still, some information were very hard to find.

Back in the day, it was more a problem of resources than ability or ideas, because hardware was expensive, open source was less prevalent, etc, but now almost everyone has the resources so now you need to be creatively and mentally on top of your game to compete instead. Being persuasive and able to get your work seen is also more important than ever. Lots of great work gets produced that never breaks out.

All that said, when things become more about talent than resources, it reduces the privilege needed to make an impact, so it certainly has its plus points.

Unless you make some sort of lucky viral, now what you need is massive resources for marketing... as I continue with my startup this become more and more obvious, there is no decent success in the game industry without massive marketing, from AAA (Activision expends on its main games around 250 million in marketing budget only), to Indie (many small successful indie games had big marketing budgets, or had others with those budgets doing the marketing for them, successful indies either are close friends of other successful ones or are rich or are close to the media industry, for example was journalist or worked for CMP Media)

When we wanted to announce we phoned up journalists, made appointments. We flew to the US, we went to PAX (with no booth) and tried to approach journalists cold to give a demo on a laptop in the corner.

We got a bunch of small articles, and bugger all web traffic. I think on announcement day we got articles on most of the major internet gaming news sites, but we still only got like 7000 visits to our website. This was in 2010.

But we kept on going. We kept on banging the drum. We kept making announcements. We kept making trips to America to talk to journalists in person. We kept grinding up the popularity and by the time we were ready to go in to open beta in January this year, we were a notable enough thing that on that day we got a million visits.

It wasn't an instant success. We didn't spend money beyond travel expenses. We didn't have prior connections. It was just a cold, hard slog from nothing to something.

You still need to make a game that is playable, has replay value, engages the person and is fun to play. That is no easy task at all.

Some have the gift for it and for those this is an incredible opportunity. I look at Temple Run and Ting Wings on iOS. Two games that stand out for their uniqueness and that were developed by 1 or 2 people.

No one is getting anywhere making another Tetris clone or a match 3 game unless there is really unique twist to the game.

At the end of the day, the tools are much much better but you still need that gift to know what will click with people.

What has changed is the opportunities of good game designers, and tons of other fields that can much easier leverage the awesome power of computing to achieve success.

EDIT:

> As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)

I don't think his point was that StackOverflow was an example of something that was easy to build, I think he meant is as a example of a resource that didn't exist when Carmack wrote DOOM.

All they have done is raise the standards, you can't just knock out something of the W3D standard and make millions, these days people expect quality that cost upwards of 100M to make a top hit.

Disagree. What they have done is reduced the amount of effort that needs to be invested in the technical aspect, thus increasing the amount of time that can be invested in the creative aspect. In other words, they have changed the field on which contenders compete.

I used to play games on a commodore which only showed pixels. I remember playing pirates and feeling like a real pirate.

At least people who can make compelling games and stories are not hindered any more if they're not a genius programmer.