I'll weigh in because I know Jason, one of the people profiled. His modesty obscures the fact that starting, running, and growing Clockspot wasn't an easy ride by any means.
But Jason did pull this off almost entirely on his own.
Clockspot was actually the one example that did resonate with me, as I'm working toward a similar kind of soup-to-nuts one-man app stack that he did in creating a time-clock with mobile clients. I mean, it's straightforward and doesn't involve Hard Problems other than having to use at least a couple different and possibly-newish languages, right? It's seems to be pretty much a textbook REST app.
I also really like seeing improved and successful implementations of existing technology, proven in the story by the example of his dad being perfectly willing to get a punch style timeclock in this day and age. And not only is Clockspot able to leverage the history of timeclocks, it can also be seen to be a kind of "time twitter," so all of the published domain expertise about implementing that can be relied on to provide another huge chunk of the app and mobile clients.
Clockspot looks really nice and by the numbers quoted it sounds very successful.
I'm quite intrigued by how he arrived at the current pricing model. It looks like it's been through a few iterations and I'd be really interested to learn more about it.
Does anyone know if this has been discussed anywhere online?
But Jason did pull this off almost entirely on his own.