[ibdknox]

Hey Evan, I have immense respect for your work, but this is surprisingly armchair quarterbackish.

> "The competition has millions of man-hours invested". Who cares? On a day-to-day basis I execute maybe 3% of the code paths in my editor

This is the Microsoft Office argument and the problem is that no one uses the same 3%. If they did, sure it'd be "dead simple", by that of course I mean take many, many years of work. Sublime which attempts to do far less than we wanted to took 5 years to get to today and I'm not sure it really is a commercial success capable of supporting 3+ people.

> "Programmers don't pay for software". I'm sorry, but this is a poor excuse

It's far from an excuse, it's the truth. It doesn't matter if developers as a class have a lot of money. They don't actually spend it. I don't know a single person who has ever personally paid for Visual Studio. Github is a service and the vast majority of their money comes from companies not individuals. How many people run stuff only on the heroku free tier?

Or here's a direct example: when we launched the kickstarter people \freaked\ out about us pricing it at $50. We had to drop it all the way to $15 and folks still complained endlessly about it. It is well known that short of a service targeted at companies, it is near impossible to sell developer tools. After all, it's a group of people who look at a piece of software and say "I can build that".

If there's some secret, we're missing it. There's an entire organization [0] that has grown up around trying to help dev focused companies figure this stuff out. It's led by James Lindenbaum (co-founder of Heroku, invested in us), he knows his stuff and he couldn't figure out a way to make this work out either.

[0]: http://heavybit.com/

[dubcanada]

You need to understand that people like to complain about stuff. If they complained about the $50 and then you dropped it to $15. They got exactly what they wanted. Why would they not just keep complaining to get it down another $5?

People pay for stuff that is useful to them, the problem with light table is people don't understand why it is useful to them until they think about it/look at it. You should have completely ignored every complaint related too money.

VS costs hundreds of dollars (going into the thousands for MSDN). And it is used by hundreds of thousands of programmers.

If product A results in a increase in productivity people will pay for it.

[ibdknox]

Microsoft is an irrational actor: they will sink billions of dollars into VS without regard for direct return in order to secure Windows as a platform. Using them as an example is useless. Moreover, VS is "purchased" almost exclusively as part of the entire Microsoft stack. When I was there a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue came from anyone actually just buying VS.

[seanmcdirmid]

I've heard rumors that VS is a $1b/year business, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at.

How does Eve compare to something like Autodesk's design script?

[dubcanada]

Okay then sublime text. Hundreds of thousands of people have paid for that.

[ibdknox]

Out of curiosity, do you have real numbers there? I'd be quite surprised if it was really hundreds of thousands.

[dubcanada]

Why? It's probably one of the most popular editors for PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript/Ruby/Python.

According to https://sublime.wbond.net/stats there are roughly 2.5M sublime text users. If even 10% of them paid for it, that would be 250,000. Assuming 10% is a little high, let's do 1% would would be 25,000.

Even if those numbers are wrong (which they may be I have no idea how he gets those numbers, and if everyone is using Package Control) there can very easily be hundreds of thousands of paid licenses.

[mtrimpe]

What's also missing in this discussion is that you can get programmers to get their companies to pay tons of cash.

Building a consultancy company around a technology product is probably on of IT's most classic business models.

[ibdknox]

That is certainly true, though I haven't seen many IDE-based consultancies. In our particular case, that wouldn't have been the right direction - none of us want to be "programming", much less doing it at other people's whim.

[mtrimpe]

I meant to refer to Eve and not LightTable.

From what I understand something like Eve is begging for a hybrid product/consultancy approach...

Putting personal preferences aside it would by far be the most logical path towards building a big business out of it.

[ibdknox]

Ah yeah, Eve has a ton of interesting business opportunities around it, everything from on demand computation/hosting (heroku) to collaboration and versioning (github). Consulting or even just building products of our own that are much easier to maintain/faster to build is also an option.