> For >95% of startups, however, technical diligence is a waste of time for a more fundamental reason: in today's world of SaaS tools, APIs, and cloud infrastructure, most startup ideas don't have significant technical risk. That means technical resources are rarely the cause of success or the reason for failure.
While it's a tough pill to swallow for many engineers, there's a lot of truth in it.
The company I work for (Bored Panda) is a pretty good example of it. I was the first full time engineer, and the company already had 20+ millions of monthly visitors and ~2m facebook followers. Surely, there was tons of technical debt to clean up and uptime was... really poor :)
It was mentioned in the post that companies such Tesla, Theranos, etc are the exceptions and that's absolutely correct (it would be very naive to think otherwise).
> From Google description, "Bored Panda is a leading art, design and photography community for creative people. Our submission platform helps artists and creators turn their stories into."
Whoops! It happened quite a few times that some artist submitted their work (photos, illustrations, etc), our experienced editorial team polished them and the attention and traffic really kickstarted their career. Here are some selected stories: http://www.boredpanda.com/success-stories/ .
Also, I believe, we contributed significantly to the coloring-books-for-artists trend which was quite a thing in late 2015 and sold loads and loads of copies, because I think we were the first major publisher to publish a story about them.
Not something world changing, but it's good to know that I contributed in one way or another to actually help some artists :)
There were one or two part time engineers, who were freelancing while still at the university, for some time before I joined the company. When I joined the company, there was no monitoring, no tests, no automated deployments (drag and drop using ftp client), no A/B tests, etc. But the editorial team worked really hard to prepare the best content possible, and users kept returning for it. I was fully aware of it before I joined, thought it might be a fun challenge to turn it around. It was fun indeed :)
But for the first year or two, while it was gaining initial traction, it was just wordpress installation on shared hosting, with a free wordpress theme. The founder is tech savvy but not an engineer. And it's a bootstrapped business, the typical born-in-the-college-dorm.
While it's a tough pill to swallow for many engineers, there's a lot of truth in it.
The company I work for (Bored Panda) is a pretty good example of it. I was the first full time engineer, and the company already had 20+ millions of monthly visitors and ~2m facebook followers. Surely, there was tons of technical debt to clean up and uptime was... really poor :)