The key part you&#x27;re ignoring is &quot;Most significant products (e.g. Dropbox)&quot;<p>There&#x27;s no way you could clone Dropbox&#x27;s first version in anything less than 6 months, and that assumes you&#x27;re a <i>great</i> programmer.<p>It took the Dropbox team something like 18 months to publicly release, which was all paid for by funding. It required significant funding to build <i>and</i> to operate (freemium).<p>reddit was also created with funding and could not have existed without funding. It made no money.<p>I know the story of a lone developer creating a little app that takes off sounds good, but the reality is most <i>significant</i> projects take a good amount of time and money.