Fred Wilson writes:
It may take only two or three great developers to build and launch a web service. But it still takes a bunch more to maintain it, develop it from there, deal with scalability, deal with feature enhancements, take the service in new directions, respond to competitive threats, etc, etc.
Two years into the creation of a web services company, you’ll certainly have more than ten engineers on your team and you could be looking at closer to twenty. That costs money.
Another unavoidable fact is that customers are expensive. They require service. And you can’t provide customer service forever with a blog that most of your customers don’t even know exists. You have to provide email support for sure. And more and more web services company (certainly the ones who want to service mainstream customers) are moving to some form of phone support.
