hezekiah

You're a good writer, I think you should take it all the way to a full-size book, get O'Reilly to publish or self-publish on Amazon.

"Our plan was to allow users to upload an image file, and display the uploaded image in the browser. Back in the 90's this would have qualified as a business model for an IPO."

Tru dat!

Reading it now; excellent introduction! I'm what you might call an "experienced developer" - I've been writing code since I was a little kid typing in Basic games to an Apple II - but I still find this back-to-the-basics approach more helpful than the usual high-level intro.

Thanks!

Learn the difference between median and average. It will change your life. :-)

Not quite accurate, read the article:

"By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170"

That's MEDIAN, not AVERAGE. Average is even worse, as you say drawn up by the few very wealthy. But with median, the wealth disparity is already astounding. It's a racial issue. We can debate the reasons, but the fact remains. Middle class and even lower class white households still have much more wealth on average than their black counterparts in the same income group.

If you've ever read Henry Ford's autobiography - a man who once took apart an entire car to the last bolt and reassembled it by himself - he says much the same.

When I had a startup selling software to banks, sales cycles were never less than a year, often more so.

You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses.

You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that have raised a million dollars and don't have that much revenue.

Don't forget advertising. Sure you need lots of hits to make good revenue, but I know guys living off only ads for their apps. They also offer paid versions, but these tend to be a minority of the revenue. Don't underestimate what adsense/admob plus some social media exposure can get you.

You probably don't realize how successful you are already. That leads me to believe that if you stick to it, you're going to be quite successful. It may take 20 years, but eventually you're going to get some traction.

It's not the idea. It's not really even execution. It's persistence. If you keep trying your startup long enough, you'll eventually make enough to live. Maybe not be rich, maybe not make as much as you could have in a big corp (TM), but you'll survive, and you'll be your own boss.

My family has been doing startups for literally generations. I'm not rich, and neither are they, but we've survived. We did it by being persistent.

Stick with it, and I know you'll succeed. Don't give up.

I've read many of these, and they all have essentially the same approach: screw over the worker.

I have seen this literally - it's low down but it does happen.

Seems hard to believe, but cool if true.

Really good article. Mentions the different fees, how they are calculated, their amounts for a typical successful album. This kind of info you normally don't come across.

doesnt work on touch devices

whats the availability of this for open source? it would be fun to hack with

this jibes with what i know about friends with their own android apps; most of the revenue is coming from ads and virtual purchases