Our Odd Startup: 3½ Guys, No VC, Profitability, and Patience
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
It sounds like Snipcart are doing something very similar to Moltin (https://moltin.com), which is a YC company.
I should have put more work into my YC app + video!
They invested temporary resources (design, frontend) and a full-time salary (mine) into Snipcart, our developer-first e-commerce platform.
The language gymnastics are entirely on your part.
edit: I'm talking about taking free money, not setting up a successful business. That is hard and they succeeded in it.
One guy, no VC, patience, problem identified, for solution, crucial secret sauce found and scalable, production quality code written, alpha test in progress, meager burn rate, no users or revenue yet.
Problem? One where the first good solution should be a "must have" for nearly everyone on the Internet.
Solution? An excellent solution now with a high technological barrier to entry and later with some strong network effects.
Solution appears to the users as just a simple Web site that looks good on everything with a Web browser up to date as of maybe 10 years ago and from just 24,000 programming language statements.
Platform? Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.0 with ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Visual Basic .NET, and a little use of C via platform invoke.
Potential? If people like the solution, then in line to be the first company worth $1T.
Side issue: Just what the .NET Core is and/or its pros/cons I don't know. Microsoft's documentation seems to assume I already know what the Core is and why I'd want it. Not the first time Microsoft didn't do well explaining their work.
Microsoft: I don't have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue what the heck the .NET Core is or why I would or would not want it; the times I tried to find out were all self-inflicted tooth drilling; I likely don't need the Core or have to care about it so gave up trying to find out.
Next, on Windows, AFAIK, the main alternative to VB.NET would be just C#. My understanding is that VB.NET and C# differ mostly only in their particular flavors of syntactic sugar and that there is a translator from one to the other, maybe from VB.NET to C#.
The flavor of C# was borrowed from C, and I don't like it. Back to K&R, the C syntax was deliberately absurdly sparse and idiosyncratic. I wrote some C code; I mowed grass in 103 F; I shoveled snow in 0 F; I didn't like any of those three.
The VB.NET syntax is closer to traditional for Pascal, PL/I, Fortran, and Algol. Compared with C#, IMHO VB.NET is easier to read, write, teach, and learn and less prone to errors from obscure syntax.
With VB.NET I get (A) objects, (B) strings, (C) memory management ("Look, Ma, no memory leaks!"), (D) good enough exceptional condition handling, (E) platform invoke for calling, say, C, (F) fast compiling with good error messages and so far no bugs encountered, (G) reasonably good documentation, (H) ability to have subroutines and functions and some scope of names functionality, (I) the usual Do While and If-Then-Else, (J) the math functions and some good time and date handling functions,(K) easy comment syntax, .... Looks fine to me.
I'd like more on scope of names, e.g., as in PL/I. Maybe a pre-processor, e.g., again as in PL/I, would be nice. At times longer precision arithmetic would be nice; I don't know what the latest x86 has in hardware. And I can think of some things new to programming languages that would be nice.
But I can't complain: VB.NET has let me write my 24,000 statements in 100,000 lines of typing (just from my favorite editor KEdit and a lot of macros but no use of an IDE). So, with the 100,000 lines for 24,000 statements, there is a lot of internal documentation.
I had no trouble debugging the code. I wrote no prototype code, and my code doesn't need refactoring. The code looks fine for quite significant production.
For ASP.NET and IIS, maybe I could gripe: First, I didn't like their approaches to Web user session state. So, I wrote my own Web Session State Server, just TCP/IP socket communications with de/serialization, and two instances of their main collection class -- darned fast and easy enough to scale just via sharding, even without Web user session affinity. For the input queue, I just used the TCP/IP FIFO; the queue depth permitted should be deep enough.
For a Web site log server, again I don't like what Microsoft has so, as soon as I rebuild the main boot partition on my development computer from a disaster, I'll take the Web Session State Store, rip out the use of the collection class, put in a file write statement, and, presto, bingo, get a Web site log server.
In total the work had a lot of mud wrestling and fighting unexpected problems.
But the work that was uniquely mine and at all predictable was all fast, fun, and easy.
Are you Terry A. Davis ?
(edit: hey, it's a legitimate question, why the downvote?)
I've done no down voting in this thread.
As far as I can tell, Visual Basic .NET is now essentially as powerful as C# or any other Microsoft language on Windows.
Supposedly C# has lambda expressions. Okay. If I need those, maybe I'll write some C#. But have VB.NET call or be called by C# is relatively easy. So, I could have a function in C# called by my main code in VB.NET.
I wrote enough C to understand it fairly well, at least at the level in K&R. I've looked at some C# code, and it seems to read easily enough. Maybe I could be writing C# in a few days. If I want to convert to C#, I understand that there is a translator to do that for me.
I do like the more traditional syntax of VB.NET instead of the deliberately "idiosyncratic" syntax of C borrowed by C#. So, I see no biggie reason not to use the syntax I prefer in VB.NET.
I learned programming long before C++ or even C. I skipped C++ -- never wrote a line of it. My first code with objects was essentially VB.NET. The objects are easy enough, close enough to what I did with structures in PL/I. Now with .NET, VB.NET, and C#, there's reduced reason to write C++ on Windows. There are plenty of serious criticisms of C++ for important production software. Yup, it's possible to write good code for big projects in C++, but just from memory management I'll let VB.NET handle that for me.
Apparently since then Google has written a huge volume of some really good code. Good for Google.
I never used the 6.0 thing but learned VB.NET right away for my present project.
On Windows, there's nothing more solid for high end software. E.g., my Web page programming is the ASP.NET part of .NET. The SQL Server programming is via the ADO.NET part.
There's nothing in my production code like PHP, Python, Lisp, etc.
If you're productive in VB.NET and can ship your MVP with it, it doesn't matter what people think about your choice of framework/language.
I got it a lot when I decided to write my backend in Go. The meme is "Go is for shitty programmers, no generics, etc" but my system doesn't bottom out at 1K QPS. I feel like the people who get into heated debates about language choice should spend more time coding then arguing about which language is the best.
Yes, there have been language wars for decades. They never made much sense and still don't.
Here is a resolution for my work now: The first choice is between Microsoft and Linux. Clearly it's possible to be successful with either of them. Like a lot of large sites, I picked Microsoft.
On Microsoft the main language choices were between VB.NET (the newer one, not the old Visual Basic 6.0) and C#. Between those two, for production code, about the only difference is just syntactic sugar. I just happen to prefer the flavor of that sugar in VB.NET. Then, for writing production code, VB.NET is essentially as good as C# or anything else on Windows. For the current state of computing, there's NOTHING wrong with the choice of VB.NET for high end production software.
More generally, so far there's no big magic in programming language deign; essentially all the ideas are 20+ years old, sometimes 40+ years old, e.g., for capabilities and access control lists, security rings, software handling of interrupts, back to Multics and PL/I in the 1960s. Heck for HN, IIRC Lisp goes back to 1959 or so. Concurrency? Dijkstra semaphores are not much used. What does get used is still simple. Sure, buried in SQL Server might be some really nice and tricky concurrency work, but only programmers specializing in SQL internals see that stuff. For algorithms and data structures, still AVL trees or red-black remain about the most advanced used. For just k-D trees, they are obscure enough that they get used only in rare special situations. For concurrency versions of some of the common algorithms, those, too, are rarely used and for narrow special situations. Sure, there's a version of the heap data structure that gives better locality of reference when using virtual memory, but, again, that need is rare.
The good news is how powerful the usual stuff, e.g., just VB.NET, actually is. We shouldn't neglect the good stuff right in front of us when, as usual, it is plenty powerful enough for the work to be done.
The main control structures remain if-then-else, do-while, and call-return. Co-routines? Not much used. Even scope of names as in PL/I has been cut back to the simplistic approach of just C. The super nice structure addressing in PL/I (we're talking 1960s here) has been replaced with the too heavy use of pointers (by the compiler) required by objects. The PL/I structures were nearly as useful as objects and much faster in the addressing. Net, in programming language design for production code, there's isn't a lot that's new and really important. So, really, in practice, just VB.NET is about as good as it gets.
Look, it's nice that you got some use out of Microsoft's frankly very irritating old developer tools. But all we're doing here is reorganizing bits, any language will do that job, although it is harder to enlist others in helping if you have settled on awkward means to get there. At some point you will have to "put up or shut up" about the thing you believe you're building.
"Play coy" has nothing to do with it. Holding off the details of the announcement until my Web site is ready to go live and please lots of people is important and the reason for not saying more now.
> 2) flog dissatisfaction with VC behavior
One lesson can learn about VC behavior from my posts is that so far, from all I've written that you don't like, no VC likes to hear at all, not a tiny bit.
So, a lesson for every entrepreneur on HN is that nothing I have written in any way covers what is necessary for VC interest.
Why is this important? VC Web sites commonly emphasize new, advanced technology, big markets, swinging for the fences, ..., etc. Well, my posts promise all of that. But no VCs respond. The same things sent to VCs via e-mail have the same results -- dead. The same things sent to VCs via Twitter -- same thing.
So, from what I am writing here, some thing necessary for VC interest is missing.
IMHO: Essentially ALL the information technology VCs are interested in is traction significant and growing rapidly. Essentially everything without that traction goes in the trash. VCs don't want to say this, but entrepreneurs need to know it or do what I did -- jerk the chains of nearly every VC on both US coasts with pitches of every style. The responses were essentially all zero; essentially the only thing missing was traction.
That VCs want traction is, thus, a fairly solid conclusion and really important for entrepreneurs to know about VCs.
Why are VCs this way? IMHO, the LPs got together and wrote out some severe criteria for VC investments. The criteria are much like in private equity or commercial banking: Only make a financial investment in a financial asset. Technology, algorithms, running code, secret sauce, etc. are all just irrelevant. For VC, the LPs are willing to bend a little and call traction significant and growing rapidly a suitable surrogate for the usual financial assets. Entrepreneurs need to know this.
But for a solo founder with the only capex needed a PC as a first server, the LPs rules are too severe.
But some of the VCs and LPs are making money now.
Here is a secret -- don't tell anyone! If I am successful, then I will have a long track record here on HN saying to the VCs "I told you so." or "You ignored me until I had revenue enough to ignore you." Or I'll be able to point to my posts here as not sufficient for any VC interest. Maybe then, finally, the VCs will be clear on what their criteria are, in one word, traction.
> 3) throw out outrageous $1T numbers,
There is nothing "outrageous" there. Instead it is just simple arithmetic.
If you are willing to entertain that there is a problem such that nearly everyone on the Web will find the first good solution a "must have" (e.g., like horse owners found the Model T), then consider the 1-2 billion users in the more developed countries, that is, where can get some good ad revenue. Assume that those people will go for the solution ballpark 3 times a week and each time see 50 ordinary ads (the user interface is interactive and iterative which is crucial for the core applied math but also good for showing users a lot of ads with, it turns out, quite good ad targeting). Assume the relatively good ad targeting. Then compare with the number of unique users, the daily user traffic, page views, ad impressions, revenue, and market cap of Google and Facebook. Done. Nothing at all outrageous.
Or get a lot of eyeball time each week from nearly everyone in the more developed countries and, presto, bingo, can monetize to $1T market cap.
Sure, a Web site for selling winter sweaters for puppy dogs on line might be an okay business, but, as a first step in picking a business idea or project, pick a problem that nearly everyone has, not just people who have a dog, cherish it, and want to walk it in cold weather. I tried to do that; dirt simple tactic.
The problem? One I had and still have, daily. I believe that essentially everyone on the Internet has the same problem. So far there is no good solution.
Why no solution? Can't get a good solution with only what is common on Sand Hill Road or in the Stanford, CMU, or MIT CS departments now. My applied math is nothing like what the AI/ML people are doing. I have nothing neural. I don't claim that my code is intelligent.
No one screaming for a solution? Well, before the Model T, horse owners were not screaming for the Model T, either. Why not? They could not imagine something both better and at all realistic. Essentially every horse owner had the problem, and the Model T was the first good solution. Same for my work: Internet users have the problem but can't imagine something both better and at all realistic.
Besides a big theme in information technology is moving ahead! E.g., in the last few months we have seen 14 TB SSDs, 16 thread consumer processors, and, from my ISP, download data rates of 100 Mbps up from about 10 Mbps over the interval, with the prices falling quickly. Main memory is going for ballpark $10/GB, one DIMM at a time, retail. Back there, 300 MB of disk storage weighed 750 pounds and cost $40,000. Big changes. Well, I have in mind another big change but will be not nearly the first.
In lots of other ways, we have seen big changes. E.g., Amazon: They were an on-line book and record shop, but consider them now. How'd they do that? Well when Bezos started, no way was the Internet data rate high enough to permit him to send so many pictures of the products. Now the pictures are so good that shopping in brick and mortar sources does not have better product information, usually much less good.
Big changes are possible.
But, I can assure you, essentially no VC in the country sees my $1T and is interested enough for a phone call, an e-mail, or even a Tweet.
E.g., USV just got a new investing partner who posted
> If you’re a founder or potential founder building something transformational, I’m so eager to meet you. I’m on a new adventure and I’m ready to dive into yours, too. You can reach me at Rebecca@USV.com.
So, I wrote her. Hear back? Nope! And I'm not holding my breath waiting!
So, why do VCs post such garbage? Curious. Conjecture: They want to maintain the image that they invest in things that are "transformational" without mentioning traction. So, it's an initial tactic for getting "deal flow" and then deal negotiation.
> 4) rile people up with arguments about VB.NET.
What's to be riled up about? As a platform, I picked Windows instead of Linux -- lots of people and serious organizations have done that.
On Windows, a key to nearly any software development of production software is the .NET Framework. Okay. Well, Visual Basic .NET can make apparently full use of the .NET Framework. Indeed, Microsoft MSDN Web pages documenting the .NET Framework, and I have about 5000 of them, are all or nearly all just the same for VB.NET as anything else, including C#.
So, what's wrong with writing in Visual Basic .NET? I see nothing wrong. What is the much better alternative? I see no significantly better alternative.
> Look, it's nice that you got some use out of Microsoft's frankly very irritating old developer tools.
What? What "old developer tools"? I wrote in Visual Basic .NET which is an essentially fully up to date language on Windows and very different from the old Visual Basic.
So, what are you concerned about?
Okay, if an I-told-you-so is your long game then fine. But here's the problem: all these words are absolutely meaningless outside your private context. From our perspective it is utterly indistinguishable from a crackpot rant. You have this major axe to grind with VCs, I don't judge that (have plenty of sour grapes myself), but what are you to gain from publishing an inscrutable diatribe? Ever hear the expression "living well is the best revenge?" It sure as hell is better than confirming their decision not to invest in you by making yourself look crazy.
At
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624067
is the thread
> Our Odd Startup: 3½ Guys, No VC, Profitability, and Patience
and I responded with
> My Odd Startup!
> One guy, no VC, patience, problem identified, for solution, crucial secret sauce found and scalable, production quality code written, alpha test in progress, meager burn rate, no users or revenue yet.
that is, I responded in kind, and you got angry.
So, you post a list of unjustified, pejorative remarks about my behavior:
> play coy
> flog dissatisfaction
> throw out outrageous
> rile people up
Then you posted
> Microsoft's frankly very irritating old developer tools.
That's uninformed: You must have in mind Microsoft's old Visual Basic, not Visual Basic .NET.
Look, in case it is not fully clear yet, at their Web sites US information technology VCs, apparently nearly all of them, are seriously, deliberately, and harmfully deceiving entrepreneurs. Hacker News readers should be aware of this fact.
The situation is not particular to me but to nearly every entrepreneur in the world who visits the Web sites.
Here is their deception: They claim to fund information technology entrepreneurs and list their criteria. But their lists are deliberately deceptive because they refuse to list the most important parts of their criteria. Here are five items, apparently important to crucial, of their criteria they refuse to list:
(1) Likely and apparently, the most important item of their criteria is that the entrepreneur's project must have traction or revenue or earnings significant and growing rapidly.
(2) Likely and apparently, one item of their criteria is that they regard any contact directly by an entrepreneur as "from over the transom" (there is some scatological symbolism here) and refuse to consider it.
(3) Likely and apparently, they nearly always insist on a "team" of several persons and will automatically reject a sole founder.
(4) They want an entrepreneur to have "references". But having references from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and Presidents of some of the world's best research universities don't count.
(5) They claim to want highly qualified entrepreneurs, but the qualifications they want would not help a person get admitted to a STEM field Ph.D. program, be hired for a tenure track position in a STEM field at a research university, etc. And peer reviewed published papers in a STEM field and relevant to the entrepreneur's company don't count, either.
Of these five, likely the most important is the first one, traction.
E.g., I posted the statement from venture firm USV:
> If you’re a founder or potential founder building something transformational, I’m so eager to meet you. I’m on a new adventure and I’m ready to dive into yours, too. You can reach me at Rebecca@USV.com.
So, here she says "potential founder" implying that she wants to hear from persons, including single persons and not necessarily a team, who are not yet founders. So, they won't yet have traction, etc.
She says "building" and not "have built". So she is considering work in progress.
Then she says:
"I’m so eager to meet you." I can't believe that.
So, I wrote her. Never heard back anything.
Her statement is just an example of the theme: VCs won't say what their real criteria are, and this is clearly both deceptive and deliberate.
Entrepreneurs are being hurt because they take the VC bait and invest time and effort in responding for no good reason.
Again, here is how this VC deliberate deception hurts entrepreneurs:
VCs don't want to say this, but entrepreneurs need to know it or do what I did -- jerk the chains of nearly every VC on both US coasts with pitches of every style all for no good reason.
Again, that VCs want traction is, thus, a fairly solid conclusion and really important for entrepreneurs to know about VCs.
> Okay, if an I-told-you-so is your long game then fine.
No it's not my "long game". It's just a small side issue and a way maybe eventually to make a point that should help entrepreneurs: If I am successful, then I will be able to claim that I long tried to get VCs interested and they never were. So, the lesson for entrepreneurs is, VC don't know how to pick good projects, and entrepreneurs should invest little or no time and effort in contacting VCs.
Am I angry with VCs for their deliberate and harmful deception? Yes. But I'm not as angry as you are with what I posted that harmed you not at all.
You continued with your pejorative and just plain wrong remarks:
> crackpot rant
> inscrutable diatribe
> You have this major axe to grind with VCs, I don't judge that (have plenty of sour grapes myself), but what are you to gain from publishing an inscrutable diatribe?
As I explained, I am in line to help other entrepreneurs.
> look crazy.
Not at all. The VCs are being deliberately deceptive and harmful, and I am warning entrepreneurs.
For your
> But here's the problem: all these words are absolutely meaningless outside your private context.
It's not my "private context" at all. What is on the VC Web sites is deliberately deceptive and harmful bait to nearly all the entrepreneurs and not just to me. What the VCs are doing is not about me; I'm just one example, but what the VCs are doing is quite general.
Clearly you didn't know the information about VCs I provided. So, I was doing you, along with all Hacker News readers, a favor. Your response was to become angry with what I wrote and attack me personally.
Your attacking what I posted looks "crazy".
My view is that until the VCs improve their ability to evaluate projects and the LPs let such VCs use their judgment, information technology VC is on the way out of business. E.g., long on average their ROI has not been good. And the world of information technology startups has changed so much that the old VC and LP approaches will no longer work.
In business, one of the most important decisions a founder makes is whom else to work with. Well, then, no good information technology entrepreneurs should want to report to a BoD of VCs -- they just don't have the "right stuff".
Some local junior college may be able to give you some remedial education in reading comprehension.
I'm being attacked because I'm posting thoughts that are unusual. It's the same as in the usual advice never to talk about politics, sex, or religion. My thoughts are upsetting to some people. One reason for the upset is just simple jealousy. Or, it is common to try to beat down a nail that sticks up. Or to gang up on anyone who does not conform to the group.
Point by point, you have yet to be able to find even a single point where I said something wrong.
But being successful, e.g., even just enough for VC funding, means that something is unusual. Planning and executing a $1T market cap is even more unusual -- just "another Google" comes along only about once each 10 years, and $1T has not happened yet. No doubt plenty of people would have dumped on Henry Ford as he was becoming successful.
I've done NOTHING wrong. The people attacking me need to look at their motivations.
I expected too much of the HN audience; I over estimated that audience and was wrong.
Bring on the upsetting, revolutionary ideas, but please, put away the vagaries and hurt feelings, for they will not serve well here. Those of us in the industry for a while have heard many, many $Texas sized ideas with no teeth.
Naw: Whatever doubts you listed VCs might have about my contacts they can resolve just by some e-mail with questions or a phone call. They don't do that.
VCs insist that a foil deck be really short. So, there's no room for a lot of, or, really, any details.
For production quality code, that's what I've written. There's nothing wrong with my code for revenue of a few million dollars a month. For 1000 times that revenue, will need a lot of attention to system management, monitoring, administration, etc., by then I'll have some software developers and we'll get some experts at Microsoft, etc. to guide us on what to do. Also Microsoft has some relevant products.
I didn't get into computing yesterday: E.g., at IBM for our AI language KnowledgeTool, I did an all-night coding session and at dawn shipped running code with the main ideas. That afternoon our relevant programmer had my code in our production code, weeks ahead of the approach my work replaced (I kept some code on the stack of dynamic descendancy, etc.). Our group shipped that code as an IBM Program Product, IBM's highest quality software product category.
At FedEx, I wrote some code to schedule the fleet. It saved the company from going out of business and was then long used for planning and evaluation of new aircraft, etc. Since that code worked fine in production, it was production code.
The VCs want references? Okay: I have listed the founder, COB, CEO of a famous Fortune 500 company and the President of one of the world's best research universities with one of the world's best computer science departments -- that person was one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisors.
For "Texas sized ideas", that's all the VCs can pursue. They need to back companies that can achieve $1+ billion exits in 10- years.
The estimate of $1T is first-cut, back of the envelope, ballpark but is not just a wild guess and has some solid data and reasoning behind it: E.g., the work is to deliver a "must have" solution for a problem nearly every user of the Internet in the world has nearly everyday, on average at least a few times a week. For the ads, run ones of interest in the more developed countries, use the revenue and market capitalizations of some well known, successful ad-supported companies, and that's the estimate.
We're supposed to knock one over the fences, and not just by luck but by planning, engineering, etc. No VC has ever looked at my estimates, planning, code, or core technology.
In this thread I listed five criteria the VCs want and my project doesn't have. A solid guess is that those are the crucial criteria. Of those, the main criterion is just traction -- the VCs want traction. My guess, explained here, is that the LPs insist on traction or something close.
I'm not some wild eyed dreamer. Instead, I hold an applied math Ph.D. from one of the world's best research universities and was a researcher in AI at IBM's Watson lab, have been at GE, FedEx, IBM, and in a lot of classified work for US national security.
All that is readily available to the VCs, but they don't care.
When my Web site goes live and if it gets traction significant and growing quickly, then via Comscore, Google's ad data, virality, publicity, etc., some VCs will notice and call me.
But by then with my meager burn rate, I won't need, want, or accept their check -- especially I don't want to report to their BoD and, with their check, suddenly go from 100% owner to 0% owner on a several year vesting schedule to get back to maybe 30% ownership while the BoD can fire me at any time for any reason or no reason. Really the VCs and BoD can just take my company, work, secret sauce, etc. and leave me with nothing. So, sure, as for Facebook and/or Google, I should have two classes of stock so that I can keep control. Hmm. It'd be mud wrestling with the VCs, BoD, and lots of lawyers.
I don't want to be a Delaware C Corp. Being a private company (Trump's companies are private), e.g., LLC, is fine with me.
Yes, the VCs want to make money. On average, in terms of ROI, they don't make much money. It's clear enough that a major fraction of VCs live well enough off their 2% without getting much from their 20%. So, they are making money enough now for all they know how to do.
No: Just a simple observation, e.g., much like horse owners needed something better, e.g., Ford's Model T which then became a "must have" for nearly every horse owner in the more developed countries. Essentially every user of the Internet has this problem everyday; currently there is no good solution on the Internet. The first good solution will be a "must have" for nearly every user on the Internet in the world. And my solution is not just good but excellent, better from being more powerful than possible with the techniques common on Sand Hill Road or in the computer science departments of Stanford, CMU, or MIT. My core technology is not computer science, AI, or ML, and is original with me. Current work in AI/ML can't get the solutions my work delivers. I'm able to do such original work; that's what my Ph.D. says and why I got it.
The estimate of $1T market capitalization is back of the envelope, first-cut, ballpark but with some reasonably solid evidence: The main evidence is just the prospect of getting on average, say, 30 minutes of eyeball time three times a week from nearly every Internet user in the more developed countries (where can get good ad rates). Comparing with other successful ad supported Web sites, the $1T is reasonable enough.
But for being speculative, it might be that, like cars where the Model T was not the end and not even the beginning of the end but just the start of the beginning, the usage and ad revenue might make the effort worth several times $1T. And there is a chance that the ad targeting can be come a big, new thing beyond just the ordinary views of ads for several times more. But that's speculative. Sure, cars are an example of how just improving on horses can become really big, e.g., create the suburbs. So are phones, PCs, dial up modems, AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, radio that became TV, computers, transistor based computers, microprocessors, and 14 nm line widths, aluminum, and more. Amazon is a big change, not just in retailing but even in logistics and the economy. So, with my project, it could become much bigger than the $1T. E.g., likely the current ad business would have difficulty supporting much over the $1T, but if go beyond ads, say, as Amazon went beyond just retailing and cars went beyond just replacing horses, and airplanes beyond what the Wright Brothers did, and satellites well beyond Sputnik, then could replace ads with something much better and get still more. But that's the speculative part. The $1T is reasonable enough, for a ballpark, first-cut, back of the envelope estimate.
But, my applied math has some generality for taking in common data and putting out valuable information and could be applied to and be the core of something bigger than my current goal of the $1T.
Then a solution, based on some new data and some rock solid applied math, complete with theorems and proofs (I hold a good Ph.D. in such work) based on some advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. The math is nicely typed into a document via Knuth's TeX. No, not LaTeX, just Knuth's original, long essentially totally bug free TeX. It's a nice applied math document. Am I going to publish that secret sauce? Heck no!
A new, innovative, very different, but simple and easy to use, UI/UX that is interactive, iterative, somewhat game like, and for some users addictive and that helps generate the new data. The UI/UX needs just a Web browser up to date as of 10+ years ago. E.g., ASP.NET automatically wrote a little JavaScript for me, but I never wrote even a single line of it. That ASP.NET is the only JavaScript for the site, and even that is optional (I suspect it has to do with cursor positioning). The Web pages, then, are just dirt simple, send for <= 400,000 bits per page, with the JavaScript so load very quickly. There's no use of Ajax. The fonts are large; the colors easy to see (about 25% of men are partially red-green color blind but will be able to read my Web pages just fine); the backgrounds are all just white; the contrast is high. The pages are just dirt simple with just a few of the simple, standard HTML controls nearly everyone on the Internet understands; there are no icons, roll-overs, pull-downs, pop-ups, overlays, etc.; the screens just load, BAM, and don't jump around during loading. The pages will look fine on everything from a smartphone to a high end workstation.
Production quality code in solid Windows Visual Basic .NET (no, NOT the old, simplistic, weak, unsupported Visual Basic 6.0), essentially the most powerful language for the .NET Framework on Windows, e.g., essentially just a different flavor of syntactic sugar compared with C#, fine, about as good as it gets these days for production quality software. The code is 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of code; so, right, is profusely documented in the code but also otherwise.
Code running as intended with no known bugs and in alpha test. Code intended for first production through a quite significant company, say, $10 million a month in revenue with nearly nothing in opex. So, no prototype code. No minimum viable product. No stuck together with chewing gum and bailing wire. No refactoring needed. Instead, solid, production code. My first Web site, first use of SQL Server, first use of Visual Basic .NET, first use of .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, my first UI design, my first Web page design, all production quality work from the beginning with no intermediate steps, prototypes, redesigns, refactorings, etc. I typed in the code myself using just my favorite text editor KEdit. I made no use of an integrated development environment (IDE). I had no difficult debugging. Timings show that the code is shockingly fast. The data base has only clustered keys, no foreign keys, and no joins. SQL Server is being used as not much more than just a B-tree data base system. In production, SQL Server is being lightly used -- the main data manipulations are elsewhere in my code. There is an off-line, batch program that reads the SQL Server data and does some initial processing later used on-line.
It's a good project, a darned good project. There's just good planning, applied math, software development, etc. and nothing over confident.
I didn't get into such work yesterday or even recently. I've been successful doing applied math and computing for US national security and business for decades. I know very well just what the heck I'm doing. It all worked just as I originally intended. There were some problems but not specific to my project. All the work unique to my project was fast, fun, and easy for me.
Oh, by the way, I am 100% completely, totally, absolutely, permanently unemployable for any job above stocking shelves at Wal-Mart and likely even that. I'm a native born US citizen, never arrested, in good health, never filed an insurance claim of any kind, never sued or been sued, never convicted of any crime worst than a minor traffic violation, have not had a traffic violation in 10+ years, never used illegal drugs or used legal drugs illegally, etc. Yup, permanently unemployable.
For a solo founder to build a company worth $1T is exceptional; same for $100 billion, $10 billion, $1 billion (the VCs hope for), $100 million. So, one might suspect that in some ways such a person and project would be a little different from what is quite common. So be it.
A good thing about the Web is that the users don't know anything about the owner of the Web site; they might be a dog, wearing blue jeans.