@ damien, you should start pondering the success of your startup when you’re selling household items on ebay to pay for bandwidth bills, not everyone makes it out alive
Thanks Jeff, this has really cheered me up!
http://blog.goodbaad.com/2009/01/success-and-positivity.html
Jeff, thank you for this! I forget it too often in too many aspects of my life… but someday my trumpet playing won’t blow (and I won’t scream so much when coding – i should say testing, coding’s the fun part).
Jeff, thank you for strengthening my faith in my upcoming startup with my dudes, since at the worst we are going to love what we are going to do, and hopefully I am seeing it is going to be a big success over a big chunk of time (2~3 years).
Referring back to your article ‘Finishing The Game’, what is the probability that I worked with you in NC and studied mathematics under Keith Devlin? (Happy New Year to you!).
Indeed, it’s an illusion to think succes really comes overnight.
A friend of mine spoke of a presentation he had a while ago at work which was about the same symptom.
First slide: an empty white slide.
Second slide: empty, except for one black pixel. The audience was asked to see if they could spot the pixel. No one spotted it.
Third slide: empty, except for two black pixels…again the same question. Still no one spotted it.
Fourth slide: empty, except for four black pixels…same question, same answer.
By slide 10 everyone spotted a small 20x20 spot, but around slide 18 the spot seemed to ‘explode’, and by slide 20 the slide was black.
In an everyday scenario the general audience simply does not see the slide 0-15 stages of a product/service/website, and as soon as they see it, it’s ‘exploding’ and it looks like it happened overnight.
There are exceptions though ; YouTube didn’t happen overnight, but it went much faster than the others.
I’m anxiously awaiting the explosion at my own site (http://oxle.com), but I’m afraid it’ll be stuck at slide 10. 
Nothing happens overnight,
I do have one quibble with what you’re saying. It is quite possible to turn people off so much that there is no way to recover. I’m thinking of cuil, for example. I would find it hard to believe that the site can ultimately prosper after so much hype and disappointment.
So even if you plan on starting small and growing incrementally over time you still need to make sure what you’re doing is quality work. If StackOverflow had been so buggy that no one could stand to use it, no amount of proclaiming how you had fixed things would have convinced people to come back. And beta no longer means anything to anybody thanks to google.
Great piece, lots of association for me. Not in the general cloud computing sense, more in the belief that something someday will spark the fuse and the dynamite will be set alight. Regular follower of the blog, keep it up. J
Jeff,
Did you have to take a loan, or did the ads on your blog create enough of a profit to take it on full time? Are you really able to live comfortably off the revenue of this blog? Are you paying your helpers, or is it more of a dot-com bubble stock option?
I am really intrigued by how successful SO has already become. Congrats man!
How true, definitely programming is something you learn over years and well never really stop learning. I look back at some of my programs and am slightly embarrassed by them now but thought they were great at the time.
This is also shown in how long it takes to move up the ladder of programming jobs. Not that they are usually called anything else just in terms of pay.
Bit unrelated but do you have trouble keeping motivated with stack overflow bearing in mind you are working for yourself, isn’t it tempting to have days off, or work on something else.
Yea but TWITter and all those other social places are a complete waste of time for adults who are serious. Sure, some are playing around with it. But, in time they will come to realize how absurd it is to be in-touch with nearly everyone nearly all the time. SO is wonderful because I dont waste my time there. I ask or retrieve the information I need and I dont have to tell someone that I am cutting my toe nails or heading down to a horrible meeting or had a fight with my boss or I am listening to Yes while compiling my routines… who cares about that.
Nice, very nice article, I have to use this in class with my programmers. Can I?
Good call.
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly - G.K. Chesterton
You’re the best blog on the internet in my opinion.
Jeff, your advice of stick to a posting schedule is the most useful tip I’ve ever received. It’s helped me a lot with my blog. All other blogging advices are useless, until you can stick with it.
Definatly my fav software/programming/tech blog.
Been doing my blog now for six months… I guess I should start getting ready to be popular too… I’d be happy with just a fraction of your success.
Stack Overflow has an audience naturally limited by the number of people who do the work. I suppose you could and probably should branch into other areas, which would greatly expand the audience. I just think it’s a little unfair to yourself, and maybe bit unrealistic, to compare your service to two other products whose audience is all Internet users. The question isn’t where Stack Overflow ranks against Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s where Stack Overflow ranks with Programmers.
Strangely, this post almost exactly describes my adventures in Oregon Trail.
You win the blog!