Yeah it is. I've never seen any startup or project fail due to code quality.
Mind sharing your experience? How many dev months had you guys been writing code before code quality became an issue? And why was it so hard to fix?
One might look at these companies and say that they are "successful" because they employ people, and some might even sell in the 7-figure range. But looking closely, each of the employees at the company could be more successful working for another company, where they don't spend their time firefighting, and instead focus on up-leveling their experience.
If devs are spending time “up-leveling their experience”, that just indicates that it’s a pretty slow-paced field where that time can be traded. It doesn’t mean anything about the business itself.
Maybe you never heard about it, but it was the leading social network before MySpace then Facebook.
It was unable to scale, and as a consequence suffered bad performances and downtime and eventually all the users moved to more recent SN.
MySpace also had similar problems, their main app was an crappy ColdFusion app that they struggled to update to add features or fix bugs.
Facebook on the other hand, was far better technically and it's probably why they won the social network war.
MySpace was sold to News Corporation for millions, it definitely didn't fail as a startup. There's a point where code quality becomes important, I don't think anyone's denying that, but it's after you've got traction and product-market fit.
(That was linked from http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... but I had to fix the link, since it went to apps.ycombinator.com which must have been the HN URL at the time. Maybe dang can update DNS to make those old links redirect? Everything after the host was still correct.)