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0 pointsgdubs8y ago0 comments

It's a gamble. But, there are other examples of this: the company that created Slack was trying to make a successful game when they realized their internal comms tool was more interesting. Will Wright was making a helicopter sim when he fell in love with the game's city-building tool.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

koboll8y ago· 1 in thread

They also created Flickr. Both Flickr and Slack were detours to market internal tools to outside customers on the way to making a game which never actually got made.

Why can't Stripe do the same thing? It's got this gigantic customer base of fledgling businesses; why not start building internal tools and then, once they're mature and battle-tested internally, offer them publicly to the growing businesses they already work with? It's an ingenious move.

aytekin8y ago

Stripe is so profitable that anything else they make will look like a joke for the first few years. It is easier to pivot from an unsuccessful product.

jonny_eh8y ago· 1 in thread

Which he later went back to, Sim Copter

egypturnash8y ago

Nah, he finished the chopper game that Sim City grew out of.

"Wright continued to develop the editor for [Raid On Bungeling Bay] as a personal toy because he enjoyed it so much. He researched urban planning and realised that others might enjoy constructing and building cities themselves. The result was a more advanced simulation that eventually became SimCity."

- the Wikipedia page on RoBB, which also notes that it selling about a mullion units in Japan was a large part of what gave Wright the financial freedom to build Sim City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay

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