Is your startup a company or just a feature?

Presumably whoever wrote an app that sells for $1 to $5 realized that the barrier to entry was low and leveraged that product into a product line. No revenue stream is going to last forever, eventually phones too will commoditize and squeeze the margins out.

As long at the developer retained more revenue than it cost to develop the product then it was a success. I don't care whether my startup is a 'company' or a 'feature' I care whether it makes money. If you can sell to another company just before your product becomes a commodity then that's even better.

Sounds like he's just jealous the IM Sense guys got a pay day for a $1 app.

Money Quote: "Surely their sales would drop to near zero since the feature is now free."

Better let the bottled water industry know they are about to be put out of business by the tap.

First, HDR is not available on the iPhone 3G or 3GS so those who didn't have a 4 would buy the app (and they do). Second, Posterous email-in a blog post is a feature that is available to any blog platform I'm aware of but what they did differently is to focus on it making blogging as simple as can be. It was sort of a reverse engineering of the whole work-flow. That turned into a community and it is that community that is the product. They found a niche within making a company based on a neglected feature. Cute.

Feature v. Company is a matter of scale. Google buys real companies all the time and turns them into features.

Posted something similar a while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580396

the way i see it, companies are a just feature of the entrepreneurial life.

Here you go new acronym: FNAC - Feature not a company

He called Apple the greatest company in the world. Anyone else immediately flinch?

Here's the thing: bigger companies often buy "feature" startups to -- well, add features. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to start one.

Leverage is mostly about having a place to stand on not about having a big stick.