zlacker

>>waxpan+(OP)
No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that.

This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as the cause for failure but ignoring the fact that Ello was dead in the water regardless of it. The company had no users and no business model. Heck a reasonable amount of ethical advertising may actually have done some good for the community and helped the product survive.

>>paxys+k02
I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expertise + moderate programming skills.

>>hiAndr+P92
Can you give us examples of such startups?

Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.