It’s particularly difficult if you’re in the place where your product isn’t well developed and you don’t have product-market fit.

Salesforce.com is a great case study, they executed with great discipline, fot a huge amount of funding in the first year

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/salesforce/company_f...

and they’re famous for resisting customer demands to change the way they do things. Instead they developed a model for customers to run their own code inside their platform, access it through an API, etc.

There’s another idea which fascinates me that I’ve rarely seen executed well which is to develop something that is a hybrid of custom and prepackaged software. I worked at a place that had developed in the early 2000’s a packaged web site for wineries to sell wine online and when I went driving around the finger lakes (where I live) I would always see the signs of wineries who were our customers. Despite having a few things like that the company struggled financially and collapse under the weight of technical debt. (For one thing they depended on a proprietary language called Tango which let you build web sites with an interface like Scratch. I told them they ought to hire a CS intern to help write their own Tango implementation but they weren’t ready to do so.)

The authors of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Software-Factories-Assembling-Applica...

wanted to make this happen. They were in charge of the enterprise version of Visual Studio and unfortunately it turned out nowhere near as cool as what they speculate about in that book.

I am happy with HTMX for my RSS reader. The issue with front end apps is, and always has been, the complexity of updating the UI after a user makes a change.

For instance, inside an HTMX application, I just coded up a plain ordinary