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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Today I gave advice to wifes friend friend. Who wants to build something "like ebay or amazon". (but cannot programm and wants to contract)

Well, after a while they understood, there is a small difference, between a website - and a virtual market place.

Seriously, it is easy to forget, that for most people, all these technical things - is just dark magic in a black box. Which sometimes work and sometimes won't. And I find this sometimes hard to deal with, because society gets more and more technologized. At least a very basic understanding would be helpful.

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I find it useful to tell people around how many engineers that company has. They won't understand why, but they may understand that they don't understand.

I also point out when a requested feature actually exists as a whole company.

On the other hand, this is my profession and I still have no idea why Twitter has so many engineers.

Ah, the eternal temptation: "but that's Easy! I can tackle this single-handed! produces a minimal, text-only prototype which scales enough for a couple thousand users"

Scaling for infinite users as a solo developer is easy, just go Serverless!

Just make sure you have infinite money first.

What do you mean 1 part time IT guy can't run our entire SaaS product? It is just a few clicks on AWS to get it up and running.

I've started doing this too. The director of the company I work at is non-technical and will semi-regularly come to us expecting that we can build a competitor to Product XYZ in 6 months.

Pointing out that Product XYZ has 3000 employees and has been carving out a niche since 1995, while there are six of us with no knowledge of that market, is usually the only thing that gets him to accept that just because he understands what something does, it doesn't mean he understands what it takes to build it.

Classic buy vs build! Are you sure that they were not looking for a simple eCommerce site made using Shopify/BigCommerce?

Maybe they are just looking for a side hustle.

Yep. buy vs build was a big change for our company, VP made the decision to stop building but the culture is ingrained and difficult to change.

There doesn't have to be a difference, you can throw up a static list of items with price descriptions and a number you can text to purchase things.

This is how we used to sell drugs in college. It was a simple URL you could go to with pricing and you just sent texts to a burner phone to arrange a transaction.

Yeah, this would be a website. Maybe ok for one primitive shop. And for webshops there are tons of frameworks, also possible with reasonable amoumt of work.

But a virtual marketplace .. where different actors make transactions, is a different story. Consider you have a bug and people loose money because of you. It really needs to be solid.

FB Marketplace - or, you know, actually ebay or amazon - are all viable if said friend just wants to sell some shit online.

No no, it was not about selling things, it was about creating a marketplace.

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