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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either.

I'm not sure how accessible this advice is to those whose name isn't David and who don't have a tendency to say "woops!" when explaining stuff.

(ie to the non-DHH's amongst us, which I imagine is the majority)

Here's a qualificative for the article: If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.

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I don't accept your argument, but even if I did, the article still has merit.

The opposing philosophy is, "drop everything else and go full speed ahead on your product". Ok, do that. Your likely outcome is still bad. We talk ad nauseum about the successes in our field, but fool ourselves about the failures. The failure model isn't Kiko. It's the 1,000 PHP apps that we've never heard of, because they didn't get off the ground after they used up the runway they got from their founders 3 month sprint.

No matter what you do, the odds are very much against:

* You making enough money with a web app after a 3-month sprint to eat.

* You closing a round of funding of any sort.

On the flip side, if you do your product "part time", the odds are very good you'll still be nurturing your product 3 months from now, or 6 months, or two years. The "lack of focus" hurts your chances, but the sustainability helps your chances.

Also, let's just be clear about something: DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Find another excuse not to take a swing. =)

You make some good points, but I think this debate has been run round and round enough that I just want to see more data.

> DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it.

Rails was perhaps not quite as technically hard as other things, but in terms of putting together the right technology at the right time, it was brilliantly successful, far more than most products anyone here will release. So in terms of shining some light on basecamp, Rails was far more successful than doing something technically great, but obscure.

As a programmer I couldn't clear the Rails 1.0 bar technically, let alone come up with the insights DHH did to make it so usable. But the good news for other people is that didn't stop me from getting my company to break-even after only six months of part time work. Definitely the team over at 37signals (don't forget Jason) are very good and would have been successful in almost any situation.

I think the key point that they make though, is that their success comes more from their decision to play to their strengths and be pragmatic, rather than their talent.

Would you say that most of what PG says also can be discounted by your logic? If you're capable of writing one of the first successful web/e-commerce sites and creating a new Lisp dialect and starting a new type of venture firm and writing popular essays, chances are....

As far as I can tell from his articles, PG was pretty focused on Viaweb when it was starting up - not working on it 10 hours a week while holding a full-time job.

I'm attacking the idea that anyone can start a successful startup with 10 hours a week - not the idea that anyone can start a successful startup (although I'd say even there there's a bar, but it's much lower).

DHH, in this article, presents a method that he suggest applies to anybody. I'm just saying it doesn't apply to anybody.

A lot of things that applied to Graham in the mid-90s no longer apply. The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate.

If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.

> The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate.

The book "Growing a Business", written in the '80ies, about a gardening catalog company of all things, has a lot of the same lessons as "getting real", and to boot comes with its very own ISBN.

Here's my summary of it (but go buy it, it's a good one):

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business

At first I was like another link to another business book about blah blah blah but after reading the short summary you provided. I must say sir if I could upvote you thrice I would. Looks like an awesome book! I tend to put more weight on age old principles than the conflicting advice I get from most blog roll submissions here. Thank you!

I'm not sure "Getting Real" sums up 37Signals' business anymore. Since they wrote that, they seem to have melded it with Joel's "hire smart people and keep them happy" strategy.

But this looks like an awesome book, and I just bought it. Thanks!

He's not saying that anyone can start a successful startup in 10 hours per week. Quite the contrary:

"Odds are you’ll fail. Just as odds are you’ll fail if you take millions of VC money, hire a staff of twenty, and spend 120 hours/week on it."

The take-home point of the essay, ISTM, is that if you only have 10 hours a week for your startup, those 10 hours can still be well spent.

I think that, difficult as it may be, looking at statistics is the only way to really answer this one. One DHH anecdote only says that it's possible to do what he did, but says nothing about the likelihood that other people may be able to repeat his success.

Most software projects use the sweatshop method. (We're late, throw more people and more hours at it.)

And most software projects fail.

Although that isn't any more definitive than anything else, it does give DHH's view some weight, and so far my experience in the industry backs it up.

The Feedburner guys were a consultancy --- BurningDoor --- since 1995. Nineteen Ninety Five. Our ISP used to host them. They had awesome offices. You know what? I'll take Dick Costello's experience over the idealized YC moonshot business plan any day of the week.

Come to think of it: BurningDoor, 37Signals; maybe this is just a Chicago thing.

Don't forget Adrian Holovaty (Django, Everyblock) and Aza Raskin (Humanized, Mozilla Labs). Also from Chicago.

Everyblock took funding and Humanized seems to have folded, but I'm happy to recognize more hometown heroes. =)

EveryBlock's funding was from a journalism grant, and rather than have some of the destructive conditions that VC money has, it had a condition that the code they produce must be publicly available at the end of the grant.

While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.

We weren't talking about most software projects though, we were talking about most startups. At least I was, and so was the original article.

I was also. I've worked for several startups, and indeed their first mistake was to develop software in crunch mode, and their second was to throw more people at it because it was late.

In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure.

Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).

"If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time."

Don't make the mistake of underestimating yourself.

I'm not suggesting that you'll go out and write Rails in 3 weekends. What I am suggesting is that the more I meet "famous" hackers and the more I meet people from this community (online and offline), the more I realize that there's not really all that much that separates us.

Lot's of people here are (obviously) brilliant. And even for those who are a little less brilliant, brilliance is only one part of the equation. Work habits, determination, perseverence, passion, and maybe most of all, belief, are just as important. Don't sell yourself short.

I have no idea if I am as brilliant as DHH. Odds are against me. But he inspires me to achieve things just as cool as his. And I just know that I can. I suspect most people here can too.

If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.

While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives.

Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.

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