[HN Gopher] Internal tools often make bad startup ideas
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       Internal tools often make bad startup ideas
        
       Author : kmdupree
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2024-02-14 21:53 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (philosophicalhacker.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (philosophicalhacker.substack.com)
        
       | greyface- wrote:
       | The obvious counterexample here would be Slack, which started out
       | as the internal comms tool for Tiny Speck, makers of the former
       | MMO Glitch (RIP).
        
         | BadHumans wrote:
         | Discord was also an internal tool from a game company. Most
         | game companies have internal tools that could be a startup
         | product on their own with a bit of tweaking.
        
       | elevaet wrote:
       | As a counterexample, Slack started as in internal tool (from what
       | I've heard), and turned out to be a very successful startup. And
       | it wasn't the kind of thing engineers don't want to build, nor an
       | integration of a legacy system.
       | 
       | Maybe all of the low hanging startup fruit of that variety has
       | been plucked.
        
         | karamanolev wrote:
         | > Maybe all of the low hanging startup fruit of that variety
         | has been plucked.
         | 
         | I felt that I agreed, but then I would have equally agreed
         | right before Slack got so popular, so ... maybe not? We often
         | don't see the long hanging fruit until it gets plucked.
         | 
         | Or rather, it's not as low hanging - just that the difficulty
         | is not technical, it's that building something nice that works
         | well together is just not easy, regardless of the vertical.
        
           | BadHumans wrote:
           | I'm of the opinion that engineers just don't understand how
           | much ease of use is worth. The infamous Dropbox comment for
           | example. Countless number of successful companies make tools
           | that are not technically amazing but they just work and are
           | designed well.
        
       | hallicopter wrote:
       | Another counter example - Jira by Atlassian started as a project
       | management tool for their agency.
       | 
       | Same with Basecamp from 37signals.
        
       | lijok wrote:
       | There are many counterexamples to this point. Temporal, Slack,
       | Nango, Trello, GitHub, Jira, Intercom, AWS, basically every
       | Terminal SaaS out there, Mailchimp, Asana, Zapier, Shopify,
       | Hubspot, etc
        
       | politician wrote:
       | It's my understanding that changes in tax treatment for software
       | development and the exclusion of internal tools from the R&D tax
       | credit will result in teams being denied authority to develop
       | internal tools (along with other things like 20% time for
       | tinkering).
       | 
       | Thus, harvesting these ideas and recasting them as standalone
       | businesses whose costs to clients are potentially deductible
       | makes sense.
        
         | kmdupree wrote:
         | OP here. very interesting point!
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-14 23:00 UTC)