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Comment by agluszak | Hacker News Reader

I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing revenue. Revenue != usefulness in general (I'm not saying that's the case here)

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>I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing revenue.

Understand your perspective but what's happening is that many programmers -- including non-founders -- on HN are drawn to factoids of devs making money without "working for the man".

Many examples of this that repeatedly resonates with the HN audience: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

So instead of characterizing it as "glamorizing revenue" ... think of it more like... "if that programmer found a way to make money outside of a corporate job, maybe I can too."

So Ivan Kutskir being able to get significant revenue while just being a 1-man operation will naturally be an interesting case study for programmers who dream of a little financial freedom.

Most of us have a ~/Code folder full of useful things that bring in $0, so I don't think there's much revenue==utility conflation happening here.

It's just that building something that brings in good money by yourself is something just about everyone wants to be able to do. It's an interesting story when people pull it off, especially another HNer.

The fact that a single person is generating that amount of revenue from this clone is a fact I find both relevant and interesting. I’m not sure there’s any particular evidence this is being “glamourised”.

Then what would you glamorize? I'd think that in a free-market economy revenue is a pretty good proxy for usefulness too in most cases.

I like to think of it this way:

Revenue != Usefulness (to the users of the app)

Revenue == Usefulness (to the recipient of the revenue)

Analogy to non-software biz:

1. CandyCo buys ChocolateCo

2. CandyCo changes ChocolateCo recipe to use less expensive ingredients, generating new revenue for CandyCo, but less tasty chocolates for ChocolateCo's long time customers.

3. The new revenue has disparate usefulness for the two interested parties.

In this case it is both. And i think people who work for BigCo have no idea how hard it is to make money outside the monopolies they work for.

I m not sure the creator of Photopea is a "founder" of anything? It's still an one-man show

Isn’t that a litmus test for a successful idea? People breaking out their wallets and paying for it?

Commercially successful idea. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ probably much more successful that https://www.gnupg.org/ but there’s a nuance.

Photopea is awesome on its own though. I really like to showcase it as an example of complete web app.

Depends on how you define success. Is a business which brings in $1,000,000 in revenue but costs $1,100,000 to operate, successful?

Profit is a more meaningful number. And even then, profit can be slim or negative depending on the stage of the lifecycle that business is in, yet the business can be in negative profit for good reasons and can lead to future profitability. So even then, profit alone is also not a complete indicator of business health.

It really does take a holistic look at the books and the market to determine how successful a business/idea really is.

Revenue though is "the big number" so it leads to the more sensational claims.

> I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing revenue

Why? And how "usefulness" will allow me to live comfortably?

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