[lottin]

> they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it

Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.

[cercatrova]

Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc.

There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.