Heroku’s early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million

http://www.flourish.org/blog/?p=687

by frabcus • 14 years ago

96 21 14 years ago

chris123• 14 years ago

Nice post/concept/analysis. Keep it up :)

gravitronic2• 14 years ago

Article seemed to have some amount of credibility until the part about Mac OSX making shell code "hip" around 2009 that until then would have scared Windows users... (wtf)

frabcus2• 14 years ago

Yeah, sorry - that part was a bit brief, and is only a hunch. I genuinely think though that the command line is more popular now than, say, 10 years ago.

taligent• 14 years ago

No I definitely think it is.

But I would attribute that more to the rise of cloud computing. A lot more people have access to remote UNIX servers than they normally would in the past.

davedx• 14 years ago

I agree with you, to be honest.

Also, nice article. Well written and interesting.

andypants• 14 years ago

I think it's simply related to the fact that the Mac OS has become more popular, not necessarily the command line.

Only a correlation. Regular users generally don't use the command line.

gravitronic2• 14 years ago

I enjoyed the article.

That part just kinda seemed like you were letting your personal bias through a bit too overtly for it to be left uncommented on.

nl• 14 years ago

If you are using Rails you are going to be using the commandline at some point.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

Even developers on Windows almost universally use IDE's. It's only the Unix platforms that have a real shell culture anymore.

fomojola• 14 years ago

Do several things well. Double down on the ones people like.

Got to say: I think that was one of the best summaries I've seen yet of the path to success. Excellent writeup.

jurre• 14 years ago

Very nice post. I would love to see more of these!

arturadib• 14 years ago

This is all fantastic and crucial, but please don't assume that Heroku's success was solely due to these technological ideas. (It's the typical assumption us hackers make).

Being a YC company Heroku had immediate access to a bunch of startups (potential customers, AND early feedback givers), and I wonder how much biz dev such as talks at conferences, blogging, social-mediaing, etc, they did in parallel to these tech advances.

iusable• 14 years ago

T.H.I.S.

Most people don't get the 'schlep' as pg wrote about recently. Startup success stories aren't all about One Amazing Idea and the code that goes with it. It's about the whole ride.

frabcus2• 14 years ago

Absolutely! Ironically I was investigating Heroku in order to think more about markets, and why its market worked. But I can see that my writeup ends up focussing more on the apparently technical side.

It's really about the market aspects of the technical side though. Why people didn't like the online code editor, but did like the straightforward solving of the Rails hosting and scaling problem. Why that particular product was a successful route to a PaaS business at that time, when often other apparently similar ones have failed.

Would love to learn more about Heroku's biz dev stuff that you talk about!

amirmc• 14 years ago

See also the (great) video by Adam of Heroku at the 2011 Startup Lessons Learned conference

"The Epic Pivot - Heroku's Story" (20mins): http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/286516447

Heroku’s early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million

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