Your local pizzeria will probably do well by just not blundering. If the pizzas, location, decor, menu, and staff are good enough then the place will do reasonably well. If you do everything right as a pizza place you survive, if you blunder you go bankrupt. On the flip side, they don't have to do anything original. Just doing OK in all dimensions is the winning strategy.
Software isn't like that. It lives in the right tail of the distribution. You can blunder everything except product and still do extremely well, because software costs nothing to produce. Your gross margins are 95%. You can blunder left and right and it doesn't matter when people like your product and pay for it. Mistakes that would destroy any other low margin business you can shrug off.
A pizza place is a local business. They differentiate themselves from other pizza places by being closer to you.
Software is global. Your tiny startup competes with open source, big tech, and everything in between. If your product is mediocre you'll struggle or fail (and rightly so). If your product is great you get a fire hose that spews money.
In basically every interview with successful founders they joke about the giant mistakes they made (that ended up just not mattering). The kind of blunders that destroy any other business are no big deal in software. The article is wrong and the lesson should be the opposite.
Software isn't like that. It lives in the right tail of the distribution. You can blunder everything except product and still do extremely well, because software costs nothing to produce. Your gross margins are 95%. You can blunder left and right and it doesn't matter when people like your product and pay for it. Mistakes that would destroy any other low margin business you can shrug off.
A pizza place is a local business. They differentiate themselves from other pizza places by being closer to you.
Software is global. Your tiny startup competes with open source, big tech, and everything in between. If your product is mediocre you'll struggle or fail (and rightly so). If your product is great you get a fire hose that spews money.
In basically every interview with successful founders they joke about the giant mistakes they made (that ended up just not mattering). The kind of blunders that destroy any other business are no big deal in software. The article is wrong and the lesson should be the opposite.