For the 1996 Olympics, the startup I was working at (Wayfarer Communications, you don't remember them) did a super fast, lightweight "medal watcher" service that took in event feeds from the games and broadcast them in real time to desktop apps.
We spent a fair amount of time building something scalable, rented some co-lo space, and in a couple of weeks had something we were pretty sure would scale to tens of thousands of users. We got . . . like a few dozen. Oops.
Never even fazed our sales guy. His pitch was something like: "We built this proof of concept system to scale to ten, twenty thousand users. Do you know how many we got?"
Customer: <non-committal nod>
Sales guy: "We got thirty."
I could never do sales, I just don't have that mindset.
(We had some pretty nifty technology for doing real-time messaging, it actually worked and wasn't a technical failure, but it was sure hard to get market share with just a bunch of APIs and some demo apps. After I left the place it was bought by a company that was in turn bought, and that's how I turned a ton of cash into 17 shares of Oracle, -spit-).
We spent a fair amount of time building something scalable, rented some co-lo space, and in a couple of weeks had something we were pretty sure would scale to tens of thousands of users. We got . . . like a few dozen. Oops.
Never even fazed our sales guy. His pitch was something like: "We built this proof of concept system to scale to ten, twenty thousand users. Do you know how many we got?"
Customer: <non-committal nod>
Sales guy: "We got thirty."
I could never do sales, I just don't have that mindset.
(We had some pretty nifty technology for doing real-time messaging, it actually worked and wasn't a technical failure, but it was sure hard to get market share with just a bunch of APIs and some demo apps. After I left the place it was bought by a company that was in turn bought, and that's how I turned a ton of cash into 17 shares of Oracle, -spit-).