What’s more, particularly for start-ups, worrying too much about future stability can actively prejudice the chances of ever getting that far. Hence my view that Chasing Great Software is just as invalid as Chasing an Exit; I’m afraid technology start-up survival (never mind success) is just a lot more subtle than that.

The same goes for poker. Your advice sounds credible at first blush but what if you have a much smaller stake than your opponents and won’t last long anyway? What if other factors (like you have to leave early) means a high-risk strategy works best for you? What if luck is on your side and you have The Nuts for that first hand … every poker player knows that a dominant win early on can set you up for the entire evening?And this is just poker – a game where the rules are set – establishing a successful start-up is way more complex than that.

My tech start-up is just coming to the end of its second year. No-one is going to buy us for $1Bn in the next few weeks but we’ve had some successes. There are many things I wish were better and some of those are related to our software and the way we deliver it. I’d be very happy to meet with you (and Rob if he were interested) to talk about the successes, the problems and how they relate. Perhaps an outside view will show we could have done things differently and had the successes without the issues? Or perhaps the reality of bootstrapping a business from nothing will challenge your view? We’re also not that far from Silicon Roundabout (or dirty Old Street Tube as I like to think of it) if you’re in the area at all.

I don’t think you understood my post. I never said “if you take care of your users, they will take care of you”. I actually explicitly said that I don’t know what users want or makes start-ups successful. But I have seen many start-ups go to the wall because they couldn’t maintain the pace of development for more than a year or two, and I have seen start-ups go to the wall because they didn’t listen to their users. If I was advising poker players, the equivalent would be “don’t bet the farm on your first hand, so you get to play more hands, and learn (e.g., about the other players’ tells) from each hand you play”.

I guess my disquiet with the article, and the sentiment behind it, is that it starts off ranting against one blinkered view – that the only purpose of a start-up is to exit for for big bags of cash – and then proposes another blinkered view as a better alternative: if you take care of the software and users, they will take care of you.

Jason, as a software consultant this view may well work for you but to my mind it is no more valid than the get-rich-quick message that you rail against. Start-up history is littered with great technology solutions that a few people (the devs and a handful of users) loved but which never made any money. Many of those chewed through a chunk of invested cash, whether from an institution or friends and family, and relied on the goodwill of people working for sweat equity or options. Were these in some way being more honest by focusing on the software and users rather than making money? I don’t think so.

And whilst I do agree that start-up success is largely a lottery, only the very lucky do well despite themselves. Many more generate their own luck by working hard at doing roughly the right thing in roughly the right place at roughly the right time. Software quality is part of that process but its only a part and if you don’t take care of all the other bits, even when they’re in tension with delivering quality, you’re just getting distracted by a different type of Shiny.