There will be a lot more example of this in the coming years because the costs of keeping a pre-PMF webapp online have basically fallen to zero. Whereas when Zuckerberg started Facebook, if it didn't take off right away then you had no choice but to shut it down.
When you hear VCs and other folks cast doubt on the ability of anything that doesn't immediately capture lightning in a bottle to succeed in the long term, they are incorrectly pattern matching to a trend from the past that just happened to be an artifact of the economics of that time period.
Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap (<$50/mo) tier, tons of helpful tools with free or cheap tiers, you can get users / customers for free on social media and probably more effectively than traditional ads / PR coverage.
It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if you don’t upgrade your stack a bit, market change could make you irrelevant etc
But in general there’s a lot of products that can simmer and slowly iterate for a long time as long as founder keeps chipping away as evidenced here.
The overall cost of building a product and getting a product to PMF is higher, but the main cost is time. That's why it can be advantageous to just work on something for ten years rather than going out, raising a bunch of money, and shutting down two years later.
Mostly you can't, especially if you're a b2b SaaS.
This is Zuck's interview in 2005 in Stanford: >So, I mean when you’re 16 running a site and your core people are the kitchen table, your operating expenses are relatively low.
>[...] we just kept our operating expenses low so far and by doing that we’ve been able to stay cash flow positive for basically the entire system’s company
>[...] we decided that it was ok to go a few months in cash flow negative while [...] like you know, using like $100,000, not like millions. So, um and then but, now were back. We do a lot of page views.
See page 26: https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs/cyberhijack/2005-10-26-Zucker...
Not necessarily. Most businesses with network effects (including Facebook) follow the "come for the tool, stay for the network" approach.
A bit more than a year later it went bust but I hoped I could still keep it alive, make it financially viable. I scaled back the infrastructure so costs would be below $30/mo again.
I recently migrated a little web app that has been online since before Facebook existed, away from the $5/mo shared hosting it had lived on since 2006.
My family’s dialup connection even came with free web hosting that ran Perl back in the 90s!
http://web.archive.org/web/20040612195543/http://www.linode....
Like I mentioned in another comment, the Microconf community is a fantastic resource for learning how to build this type of business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248246
I have a data management system that I have been working on for many years. It is core technology that could eventually be used in a SaaS or web based model, but for now it runs on a single computer with no dependencies to the Internet (other than to download the beta software at https://www.Didgets.com).
Many of the features (file system imports, database tables, quick analytics, logging framework, indexing service, etc.) have come about one weekend or a series of evenings at a time.
Congrats to Matt for sticking with it for so long.
I'm unsure if I need to be patient and keep working on it. Or cut my losses and put my time and effort into something else.
My project has zero revenue, but thousands of users and many people use it daily. That's what keeps me going.
But if you ever happen to invent a product category that turns out to be a huge untapped market, the gatekeepers-that-be (Google, Facebook, Apple et al.) will try to enter it as well and stomp you.
Even if you don't, still, they collect their rent on everything we do online nowadays.