Painful and true. When we started up we thought we were going to sell some fantastic developer tools . . . then realized that there was no money in that. Then we developed a niche product that actually pays the bills.

If money is coming in at the end of the month you're on the right track, if not then you won't be around for long.

This makes me very interested to see what happens when my company (all two of us) has a shiny, new product to hit the road later this year.

Admittedly, we're scratching an itch, and very focused on the idea of 'getting money by making our customers really, really happy.', so the idea of 'changing the world' is really way down on the list. Even so, I'm expecting a very, very interesting ride. :)

I like this article, and I think it's a good reminder, but it's also a reminder that you need to weigh each and every business and idea individually.

For example, Google and Amazon were definitely idea companies. Neither made any money -- and, in Google's case, wasn't even sure about how they'd make money -- for quite some time. But, both have seem to have done acceptably well.

To be fair though, both of those companies are extreme outliers. If you start off with a stack of funding (and lots of great advice from smart and well-connected people) then you can hop right into the big picture stuff. However, if you're a small bootstrapping company you absolutely have to get profitable as soon as possible.

Google made a fair amount of money relatively early on by licencing their search engine to portals like Yahoo, etc.

Just be careful not to get stuck just making money, your company could easily turn into a consultancy or something alike because you are first trying to make money. This happened to my first startup, it's still going, but they just do custom software development. It was a big waste of talent.

Just out of curiosity why do you say that turning into a custom software development shop is a waste of talent?

Granted yes I'm very much with the rest of the HN community that we should concentrate on making products and all.

Well, I don't think it is a general rule, in my comment I was referring exclusively to my experience with the group of people I was working with. These were very talented engineers with a great product idea, yet the whole thing finally deviated into doing whatever so that we could pay the rent and the bills. The guy who is still running the company is doing great, nevertheless the company never sold the product we originally envisioned nor it evolved from that concept.