Very few people are willing to pay the kind of money that would actually sustain a company.<p>Let&#x27;s run the math, and see if we can build a business around a text editor.<p>Let&#x27;s say we can get away with 2 good developers (across 3 platforms, that seems difficult to me).  Let&#x27;s further stipulate they are willing to take a pay cut from their previous life at Facebook and are willing to do this as a labor of love.  90k&#x2F;yr salary, 180k&#x2F;yr for both.<p>Now we need a technical writer, to handle API documentation etc.  Let&#x27;s say we can get a CS major to do it part-time at 20 hrs&#x2F;week at $20&#x2F;hr.  20k&#x2F;yr.<p>We also need a sysadmin to wrangle the CI setup, website hosting, install updates, setup email, etc.  Suppose they automated everything in Ansible&#x2F;Docker&#x2F;Kubernetes&#x2F;whatever_the_cool_kids_do_these_days and so we only need 10 hrs&#x2F;week at $50&#x2F;hr.  26k&#x2F;yr.<p>We need a QA engineer to bang on things and file proper bugs.  $50k&#x2F;yr.  Let&#x27;s further stipulate that this same person will handle customer support, because we&#x27;re a lean startup and combine multiple roles in the same individual.<p>We need somebody to handle marketing (or maybe direct sales, since it&#x27;s a $700 pricepoint).  Let&#x27;s call it another $50k&#x2F;yr.<p>We&#x27;re now up to $325k&#x2F;yr.  Traditionally we would now have to lease office space, buy macs, call our AWS sales rep, etc., but let&#x27;s assume for this conversation everybody works from home, they have their own equipment, and we got free startup AWS credit, which is not very realistic at all, but whatever.<p>So let&#x27;s stipulate this is a stable burn rate.  Nobody will get poached by Facebook, nobody needs to raise a round, if we can pull in <i>only</i> 325k&#x2F;yr, we can do this forever.<p>When we sell our $700&#x2F;license, let&#x27;s say we net 75%.  That is actually very high: most software companies net around 50-60%, because the App Store, WalMart, the state, etc., take their pound of flesh.  But our $700 text editor is so amazing that people will buy it direct from us, we will have a strong brand, <i>handwave</i>.  So we take home an incredible $525.<p>We now need to sell 700 licenses year-over-year in order to keep this thing going.  Not even 700 licenses <i>one-time</i>, but we actually need to close 60 licenses a month, 2 licenses a day, 365 days a year.  To do that, we needa  sales process.<p>I would love to live in a world where a salesman knocks on your door, does a 2-hour demo, and at the end you have 50% conversion to writing him a $700 check.  I just don&#x27;t live in that world.  And that&#x27;s the kind of sales process you&#x27;d need to <i>sustainably</i> develop a text editor.<p>Anything short of the exercise I just went through will result in a failed product.  A developer might take a pay cut for a year but will lose interest if they&#x27;re well below market.  If we don&#x27;t hire good QA then our quality will be shit and not worth $700, just think of all the shitty software you use already.  If we don&#x27;t have support then nobody will want to spend $700 to get their emails ignored.  If we fund via VC then we will have to blog about Our Incredible Journey the next time Google Docs needs an engineer.<p>The result of this analysis is the current market.  The only way to develop a text editor is either all volunteers (like Atom), a small part of a large corporation&#x27;s marketing budget (VSCode), or a labor of love from one and a half underfunded and overworked people who we somehow expect to stop being underfunded and overworked even though we only paid them like half a billable hour several years ago (ST).