I often find myself evaluating potential projects where people make a very naive estimate of how difficult and time-consuming certain things are to develop.
We’re at a point where new apps and services appear every day, others shut down, and the media constantly report on the multimillion-dollar success of the startup of the moment.
What’s often overlooked is the enormous effort and extraordinary complexity behind any application that works reasonably well, from a business, organizational, and financial perspective.
There are three companies I really like and have been following for a while: Doodle, Etsy, and Cloudinary.
If you don’t know them, Doodle is a German startup whose app makes it easier to organize events, both personal and corporate.
Etsy, meanwhile, got started many years ago, when only a few people were talking about the sharing economy. It’s a marketplace where artisans around the world can sell their products to customers anywhere. You make the product; Etsy showcases it and handles the logistics of payments and shipping it to the customer. I know people close to me who earn a little money through Etsy. To me, it’s an example to follow because of its focus on supporting the sharing economy.
Cloudinary, for its part, is a service built by developers who were tired of constantly dealing with image management in their projects. They offer a service where an application uploads the images it uses, and Cloudinary delivers them through URL-based syntax, transforming them to suit your needs and also acting as a CDN, among other things.
In my opinion, these are three very useful services that have been successful so far.
But what do they have in common, and why am I talking about them?
What you don’t see is that these services aren’t kept running by two geeks working late into the night in a garage. They rely on teams of many people to keep everything going. And I’m not just talking about technical roles (front-end developers, QA engineers, and so on), but also account managers, CEOs, marketing and community managers, and more.
You can find some information about the teams at Doodle, Etsy, and Cloudinary at the links below:
- The Doodle team has more than thirty people, in roles ranging from product managers to junior iOS engineers.
- How many people do you think work to make Etsy run? Take a look at its website and services. Well, more than a hundred people contribute to making an idea like Etsy.com work around the world.
- Cloudinary has been a great source of inspiration for me because I realized years ago how often image management comes up in projects. They’ve solved it in an extraordinary way, offering a great hosting and CDN service. No fewer than about sixty people bring Cloudinary to life.
Some time ago, I heard someone who used Groupon coupons complain about the commission they charged… This person told me, “Come on, it’s just a website.” Sure, you see the service as a website and, in the best case, as a mobile app too. But behind it is a software and hardware infrastructure that lets it operate around the world, across different legal systems and languages, while handling a huge amount of data, and much more.
So when I have to evaluate one of those overly optimistic proposals that promise to make someone rich in two days, I simply smile and arm myself with patience.