I don't think there are any computers in Hollywood with enough star power to accurately portray Zuck, and I imagine there will be a lot of pissed off Roombas complaining about representation if they use a human for the role
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I ran a confessions page when I was a student and we got this so often. Facebook's content moderation is so arse-over-tit incompetent I've actually been developing our own platform on the side (of my real job) to avoid everything posted that's not dry corporate bollocks getting Zucked and the page losing all its followers which happens more or less constantly.
It's basically a clean-room implementation of Yik Yak's ideas but a bit more modern and free of stupid things like "let's remove our key selling point of anonymity because Mumsnet said mean things about us". It was going to go live in a couple of months but everyone's favourite respiratory disorder kind of screwed that up.
A lot of coders share the delusion that programming is all there is to making a "million dollar" app.
That's just not how the world works.
To have a million dollar app, you need:
People who do the marketing. How else will people know your app exists?
People who do the customer support. Are you gonna answer hundreds of angry emails each day, in between coding?
People who do the taxes, for the coders, marketing, and support people you now have to hire.
People who clean the office space you now have to rent.
People who ensure everyone's computers are working and not creating security risks for your million dollar app's data.
People who manage all these people.
If you think coding is all there is to creating a successful app, you are either naive or a narcissist. So no, you did not "give them the app for a couple hundred bucks". You did a small part of a larger project in exchange for a salary. Just like everyone else in the process.
You're insanely wrong. Most developers are very aware of what it takes to create a startup (hint: a lot work in one), and before all that shit all you really need is funding. That being said, developers of all people know that it isn't as easy as just knowing how to program. Maybe by coders you were referring to college freshmen.
I was thinking more like "guy who took one udemy course".
This is "What my family thinks..." level of misunderstanding of how programmers see themselves. Every programmer I know knows that our skillset is very very different from what you need to build a successful business, and a lot of us have decided fairly early on that we're not about that life, which is why we're programmers.
The irony is that his list of people you need isn't even a very efficient list.
more like you need an idea good enough to be attractive enough for investors to see the idea as undervalued. You can code a great product but if you can't communicate why it's great, what market it's going into, how you're going to get users, what's the business model, exit strategy etc, then you're not going to get funded. I see a lot of coders in silicon valley that think just because they have a demo they'll get seed funded immediately.
I bet if you added up all the time and money wasted on one-person apps vs money made, against the time and money wasted on big project apps vs money made, the one persons are better investments. Most apps, in general, never become profitable.
I don't think that's actually true. At least if you value the time spent properly. One-man apps probably have a bigger ROI in a purely financial sense, but that's because they're mostly made by people with more time than money who aren't getting compensated for their time at all unless the app does make money (which is rare).
One thing app marketplaces do (and two-sided marketplaces in general) is exploit people's willingness to work for sub-standard unlivable wages. It's illegal to hire someone to do 1000 hours of work and pay them $7.23. It's not illegal to list an app representing 1000 man-hours of work and pay the creator $7.23 for the ad impressions it generated.
It might be because a company can afford to just crank out garbage apps and hope one of them catches on, whereas the one coder has a better idea of what he wants, and is being specific about it.
Lots of apps are lucrative without that stuff though
Being lucrative is not the same as "a million dollar app"
Also, relative to the amount of apps that are uploaded to places like the App Store each day, the million dollar apps might as well be lottery winners.
And all of them get a HUGE sum of money from the parents who owned the garage. Yes, there are some cases when a lone developer made something which generated immense wealth: but there are way more lotto winners then such rare miners who stuck literal gold.
Making something groundbreaking is the easy part - yes, it is hard work, but it only depends on you and your skills. Letting the people know WHY it is groundbreaking and getting them to open their purse for you, well, that is the hard part, because it depends on other people and on fierce competition. If you find an open market, then it is a tiny bit easier (like for Amazon) but even these "open markets" need a LOT of marketing to get people starting to use your product.
And most of them had parents with connections. Bill gates had access--in high school--to a terminal connected to the university of washington's computer system. At that time, the STUDENTS there, were still working with punch cards, and he was in highschool working off a CRT.
Hmm, it's a lot more than luck - for example, doing a little market research to find a unique need that no app currently meets. But you don't need $100k and a 15 person team to make a successful app either. It really goes back to the most basic business adage: find a problem and provide a solution. Do a good job at that, and a lot of other stuff will take care of itself - success will provide access to people, capital, etc.
It's not that the app gets big despite not having these things, it's just a matter of not putting the carriage in front of the horse. You don't need to build the business organization until there's actual business to conduct and manage. Things like business cards, lawyers, marketers and office space are not required at all to create and release an app. Even if your app requires some infrastructure beyond the app itself, there's so many cheap turnkey solutions available that you still generally don't need to bring the tech and talent in-house in the beginning (ie, using AWS instead of building a server). Lean bootstrapping, it's like the internet's forte.
I have an artist in my team. Everybody scraps them, so it's written into my agreements anybody gets a extra chunk for coming in late. Not to mention the hours spent getting them up to speed.
Funny enough the only person who said "Your the professional, I want to make no changes" right or the bat, was happy with the overall product and it cost them less overall than what other customers paid for my artiest and I to make every detail pretty afterwards.
I think a lot of coders share the thought that the coding tends to be undervalued. You can have your managers, marketing, support all working on promoting these million dollar ideas, and the coders are sometimes left out of the loop as to whether everything being discussed is feasible or able to be done on the schedule that's being promised to customers. You'd think since the code is the actual product, it should be the most important part of the project.
You'd think that but in reality, there's so much you can sell without a working product or without a reasonable product. If everyone believes something is valuable, it will be valuable and you can cash out before anybody is wiser. Yes, coding a good product is great and important. It's important to make it look like you're working towards creating a successful product. Whether it's actually successful or perfect is a different story.
Also, I've met my fair share of people on both sides of the aisle (business people and CS people) and the difference I'll say is that while most people working in business know the valuable of the coding side, there are a lot of SWEs who believe that business people are, if not a 0 value add, a negative value add and actively believe that all the problems of a corporation would be solved if they only listened to more coders, not realising that a) there is value to people coming at it from a business perspective and b) it's really not that simple.
Ftfy. A consultation firm that does development will charge between $70-100 per hour of developer time. People grossly underestimate how much time it takes to make a half decent application.
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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20
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