> ... grabbing a ton of users and hoping for the best isn't a good general strategy for building a business.
Everyone has their own way and why do people judge about others? Some grab a ton of users and hoping for the best and others write online tutorials for aged technologies. Let people just do what they like and appreciate if they are successful (grabbing a ton of users is as hard as it is to write good online tutorials).
You're criticizing my paraphrase of DHH, not my actual point. That point was "companies with a huge number of users are valuable, either as eventual cash cows or as strategic acquisitions, but at best following that route is a risky strategy." So you can see that I'm not judging at all: I have no problem with the high valuations of Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Growth companies with millions of users are hugely valuable even if they aren't currently making any money. (This is a point on which DHH and I respectfully disagree.)
If you want to follow a high-variance strategy, there's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is expecting that your new startup has a reasonable chance of being the next Instapintora. If you want to build a sustainable business, lower-variance strategies (which typically aim to become profitable quickly) are a better bet. I dealt with these issues explicitly in a talk I gave at LA RubyConf in 2011, which you can find here: http://youtu.be/j0jT98ZXh5M
P.S. My tutorial for an "aged" technology is only step 1 in a four-step plan for world domination; steps 2-4 are much higher-variance. Stayed tuned.
Everyone has their own way and why do people judge about others? Some grab a ton of users and hoping for the best and others write online tutorials for aged technologies. Let people just do what they like and appreciate if they are successful (grabbing a ton of users is as hard as it is to write good online tutorials).