I think it goes without saying this is not the only way you can build a sucessfull company.
There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs.
Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding.
Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind.
But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.
Hootsuite was absolutely a little snowball. Invoke Labs was an agency in Vancouver that build Ow.ly (a link shortener that's still around). They then continued to build an early ver of Hootsuite to manage their clients' social media campaigns. Then they realized that other people might want it and offered a free version. I had dinner with the founder the night before they turned on their paid plans, and he was unsure what the reception would be since they gave so much to so many people for free.
The reception was somewhat positive but they continued to grow and sell the crap out of Hootsuite and now it's on track to go public. But they started SUPER small.
Microsoft actuallly were a classic snowball in their first few years with MS BASIC.
Then, in 1981, they took the snowball and threw it smack dab into that huge towering snow slab they had noticed called the IBM PC, causing an avalanche of hitherto unknown proportions...the rest is history. :)
There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs.
Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding.
Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind.
But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.