How we built a web application and didn't launch in 482 days

http://www.decalcms.com/page/How_we_didnt_launch_in_482_days

by dools • 15 years ago

80 8 15 years ago

From the article:

CEO of Wistia on customer acquisition:

Brendan and I started Wistia in June of 2006. We quit our jobs and went in fulltime. It took us almost one year to the day to get our first customer. It took us another year to get to 6 customers. It took us another year to reach 60 customers. This past summer, 1460 days after starting Wistia we crossed 350 customers

paulirish• 15 years ago

As a chart: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+{2006%2C0}%2C+{200...

adamzais• 15 years ago

do yourself a solid...check out decalcms!

alanh• 15 years ago

Most interesting part:

> you usually don't have to do things as fast as you think you do. … David Heinemeier Hansson describes VC as a time bomb. Once you light the fuse, you have to make your business work within a short period of time.

synnik• 15 years ago

My initial startup was a CMS product in 1999.

At the time, there were few players, and few open source products. We were able to charge from $25,000 to well over $200,000 per implementation. We even had one contract for over a million to do a custom version of our codebase. And we were a bit player at the time who didn't even survive the dotcom crash.

Fast forward to today -- There are so many CMS products that you don't need to pay for them at all, and even if you do pay, they are not expensive.

Which is to say that these guys deserve a heck of a lot of credit. They are making it work for them in a very crowded space, solving problems that I had written off as solved.

Good work.

dools2• 15 years ago

A million bucks! Don't make me drool :P Talk about the glory days of CMS.

There are still "enterprise" solutions going for that much these days - you need a fair bit of "infrastructure" in your company to sell to those folks though, and probably insane levels of enterprise features (that look good on paper but are probably the reason most people that work at big organisations hate their CMS :)

Thanks for taking the time to read and comment, and for the kind words. The real test, of course, will be when we open our doors for real public feedback with live demos/public signup products. Fingers crossed!

locusm• 15 years ago

Love that photo - who needs a plush office when you can plant your MBP on a couple of milk crates!

dools2• 15 years ago

Haha yeah that's pretty "aussie style" software development there :)

How we built a web application and didn't launch in 482 days

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