In those days, I thought, golly, there are zillions of bug tracking packages out there. Every programmer has written a dinky bug tracking package. Why would anyone buy ours? I knew one thing: programmers who start businesses often have the bad habit of thinking everybody else is a programmer just like them and wants the same stuff as them, and so they have an unhealthy tendency to start businesses that sell programming tools. That’s why you see so many scrawny companies hawking source-code-generating geegaws, error catching and emailing geegaws, debugging geegaws, syntax-coloring editing tchotchkes, ftping baubles, and, ahem, bug tracking packages. All kinds of stuff that only a programmer could love. I had no intention of falling into that trap!
Of course, nothing ever works out exactly as planned. FogBUGZ was popular. Really popular. It accounts for a significant chunk of Fog Creek’s revenue and sales are growing steadily. The People won’t stop buying it.
| Author | Joel Spolsky |
| Work | Rub a dub dub |