That’s Marco Arment, the creator of The Magazine, an iOS only magazine that he launched in 2012. He’s commenting on the fact that now, less than two years and a new owner later, it will be shut down.
Many non-ideal factors and decisions I made up front probably contributed to The Magazine not being sustainable forever. But the biggest challenge was simply that running a magazine today is a really tough business. I thought making a high-quality app was the hard part that was keeping iPad magazines from being more successful, but the app turned out to be the easiest and least important part of the business.
To me this is a powerful paragraph of the attitude of us nerds when it comes to running a business. The attitude that “Build it And They Will Come” is very pronounced among us that we forgot that making something great that we think have values doesn’t necessarily mean the average people will see the same values. Sometimes, building something great just means we’re the first to get into the market and lack of competition makes us the only viable choice.
Thus, this paragraph can also explain the app store kerfuffle that happens 2 months ago, when developers are complaining about lack of income from it. Making something great is simply not enough. You really have to get things truly right from the very beginning to get considerable success now.