Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

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This is why at some point in a company's growth, you have to take the tech guys out of the business positions and stick someone who really knows business in charge.

One of my former coworkers helped build a ridiculous iPhone ringtone app a few years ago that STILL generates positive cashflow, and profited several 100k. This was done strictly through marketing. There are plenty of ways to grow a product, but these guys didn't have the know-how or wherewithal to do it for an already profitable product.

A real business person would have taken that $75k/yr and figured out a way to grow it, through marketing, by pounding the pavement, etc. Most startups are cash flow negative, and will die in a year and yet this company generating profits and weren't able to make it grow? They gave up way too easily, and like people said, it's because they got bored of it. That reeks of arrogance, sorry to say, being bored of $75k/yr.

Hopefully your current products are profitable, so that this isn't a lesson that comes back to haunt you later on. But as other people said, I also hope this doesn't mean that your current customers have to look forward to their product being closed down prematurely because your company got bored of it as well.

Well, I think it's primarily a business decision.

"We can devote $x resources on XYZ and make $75k profit, and spend more time and money to figure out how to grow it, or we can spend that $x resources on ABC, make more than $75k from that resource expenditure, and not have to invest more time/money to figure out how to grow ABC because it's already growing (either because we figured it out or we'll figure it out along the way)."

Yes there are plenty of ways to grow a product, but how much time/energy do you justify on learning/testing when you've already got other products that are more profitable and growing?

That said, the original post still focused too much on the feelings of the devs/peeps involved and didn't seem to address things from their customers' perspective. They addressed that in another reply to my earlier post, but it still set a bad tone to me off the bat.

Maybe they are making a lot of money to the point where they don't need it the extra cash. I don't know who these guys are, so maybe they're doing really well, and if so good for them.

But balking at spending effort to maintain a $75k/yr business doesn't seem "hungry" enough to me. They tried to killing off the business and dropped their price, and instead they doubled the number of users. What??? How much more of a clue do they need that they really have a viable product here?

Any businessperson worth their salt would take this and start figuring out a way to build on it. What about get an MBA intern from Wharton and give them the project of figuring out how to grow the business? Hire a real entrepreneur and tell them if they can grow the business, you'd split the profits 50/50 with them.

I mean, come on. There's a real solid base there of people who were willing to pay for their service. The BEST solution was to shut it down? I can't believe it.

You really negate yourself when you say "I don't know who these guys are."

The truth is from what I can gather and what this posts says, they're very passionate people. They don't want their name attached to a half-baked product. Nor do they want to deal with it anymore. It makes a lot of businesses sense to deal with things they ARE passionate about. $75k is small change. They don't need the hassle.

"Constant growth" is abject MBA-blather. It's $75K/yr, just let it ride and collect the free money.

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