But for one successful project that he mentions (Dropsend) there are 2 projects of his that have 'failed':
- the webapp Amigo -- https://myaccount.heyamigo.net/serviceDown.html -- that he even marketed starting a blog about its build and there was even a quote of O'Reilly talking about an untaped market.. and it's gone
- a few years back Ryan also built a subscription based online project manager, before 37Signals launched their Basecamp, and it's no longer around.
Bottom line: he says you can do it to, and he's right, but you have to really know your target market at the start (which he did with targeting Dropsend to the designer/agency market, that he knew well due to his work on BD4D) and have contacts in it to spread the word (at the start, eventually your client demographic expands)... but it isn't as easy as he makes it seem on a blog post based on one of his successes, when that formula didn't work out well for his other projects.
Bottom line: he says you can do it to, and he's right, but you have to really know your target market at the start (which he did with targeting Dropsend to the designer/agency market, that he knew well due to his work on BD4D) and have contacts in it to spread the word (at the start, eventually your client demographic expands)... but it isn't as easy as he makes it seem on a blog post based on one of his successes, when that formula didn't work out well for his other projects.