[onion2k]

The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit.

The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

[sokoloff]

This seems to me like it does happen fairly often. It’s the entire model of JetBrains, RedGate, Sublime, Atlassian, etc.

[frosted-flakes]

Adobe is a big one. The Creative Cloud suite is over $600 annually.

[bcrosby95]

Yep, and JetBrains has a pricing structure to roughly represent that. Individual license for intellij is $150. Organization license is $500.

[auggierose]

I think there are plenty of cases. Just sell your software instead of giving it away.

[tomnipotent]

> The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).

Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.

[shanecleveland]

I agree that this can be very attainable as a B2B developer. The main challenges are both knowing and understanding the problem and solution and then attracting the audience. It's doable and is being done. We hear more about the unicorns. But there is still a lot of room for the little guys.