Yep we do it every year. It's also super expensive though, basically $50 for 2 minutes of time and a pic. Growing up my family could never afford it and I was sad as a kid that I didn't get to talk to Santa.

Don't trust founders who don't let their employees early exercise.

But he entirely bootstrapped fandalism too. So his argument is completely legit. Any one of those competitors could have built a fandalism for customer acquisition too. Anyway, his point is he did this stuff all as a one man shop with no funding. Nobody can dispute that. He is David.

Which is amazing but irrelevant - if the lesson is "build something obsessively for years until you have an audience to then, also over the course of 4 years, monetize on another project - assuming you get both of these things exactly right even though they're both unbelievably hard" there's no lesson.

I know this from experience. I helped build a site used by millions of people in a particular demographic, and some of my collaborators on that project have been building products to help that demographic in deeper ways. The problem? It's still hard to get that right! 2 years into that effort they're still just starting to find product market fit for the second products.

We hit the absolute lottery to somehow get 5 million users for the original product, and they'll be hitting the lottery again if they get profitable on the second product to that audience. It's hard. Having money helps.

Why do you presume these were two separate projects? He built fandalism, then realized from running it that his users wanted something like distrokid. It is one big company called Pud Inc.

the point is that he did it. just because you or 1st year undergrads could have done it is irrelevant because guess what, none of you did.

I got a lot of criticism for my comment because I said I was not very impressed by this (mostly because my field of research is very close to what he did). Just like some people think that formatting a PC is black magic, simply because they have no idea how any of that works, but we here now that it is pretty straight-forward.

As an analogy closer to developers, would you be impressed if a 17 years old built a simplistic CRUD phone number agenda app? I'm sure some of you here were accomplishing much greater things by that age. It does not impress you because you know the complexity is not very high, even though the kid is 17 years old.

So while I think we should always encourage science and research at younger ages, I keep my opinion that this is not as impressive as some might believe.

ps.: as per your comment, well, no one can solve all the problems in the world. They lack time to absorb knowledge to understand everything that is out there, and that's why we have specialized education. These people you are mentioning (and me, since you directed it to me) have other problems to solve.

Extremely unlikely. No one did it because no one thought of it. His solution is cheap and reasonably effective.

Pretty much the equivalent of those cardboard holders you get with a cup of Starbucks coffee. Extremely simple idea, some guy just happened to think of it and run with it. Just a reminder that there is plenty of room left in the world for simple inventions and solutions to common problems.

once upon a time, all of silicon valley basically operated like this.

I just tried it out. agreed it is a great experience, but i wish they were more upfront about their pricing. I figured they were just charging the delivery fee on top of safeway's prices, but later realized they are also marking safeway up by 5%. I'm sure most people won't notice it, and most people wouldn't really care about it even if they did know about it (myself included), but somehow discovering it on my own I couldn't help but feel a little bit duped.