Like Running a Car Wash Without Water

Miracle Car Wash, originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

To my mind, the bigger issue is that you are running an Internet company without a single technical employee on your staff. This is like running a car wash without water.
– Mike Goelzer, 2006

Today I came across this quote in an email from my friend Mike to a former partner of ours.

It’s kind of amazing how back when we were starting The Daily Jolt in 1999, it was completely unthinkable to start an Internet company without programmers and a sysadmin.

There’s been a sea change.

It’s not just the availability of open source packages like Drupal and Wordpress and hosted software like Basecamp, Gmail, and CampaignMonitor — it’s that Internet companies have become ordinary, and people don’t think it’s rocket science anymore.

Six years ago, Photojojo would have been an Internet company, just as The Daily Jolt was. Today, they’re both media companies. The Internet just happens to play into their distribution platform. The same is true of any blog-based business, video blog, community site, or social network.

Even people building web apps seem to hold the assumption that they can design it, spec it, and farm it out to someone else to build.

The ease of getting started in this kind of model has allowed a lot of concepts to flourish that otherwise might not have made it. That’s awesome.

I do wonder, however, about the long-term effects of a tech startup culture that values mapping new ideas onto existing software, using something that’s almost-good-enough instead of making something new and great, and maintenance that’s as cheap as possible instead of keeping developers on staff to constantly refine and improve. Web apps are still apps, and great apps need programmers.