Very few people are willing to pay the kind of money that would actually sustain a company.

Let's run the math, and see if we can build a business around a text editor.

Let's say we can get away with 2 good developers (across 3 platforms, that seems difficult to me). Let'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/yr salary, 180k/yr for both.

Now we need a technical writer, to handle API documentation etc. Let's say we can get a CS major to do it part-time at 20 hrs/week at $20/hr. 20k/yr.

We also need a sysadmin to wrangle the CI setup, website hosting, install updates, setup email, etc. Suppose they automated everything in Ansible/Docker/Kubernetes/whatever_the_cool_kids_do_these_days and so we only need 10 hrs/week at $50/hr. 26k/yr.

We need a QA engineer to bang on things and file proper bugs. $50k/yr. Let's further stipulate that this same person will handle customer support, because we're a lean startup and combine multiple roles in the same individual.

We need somebody to handle marketing (or maybe direct sales, since it's a $700 pricepoint). Let's call it another $50k/yr.

We're now up to $325k/yr. Traditionally we would now have to lease office space, buy macs, call our AWS sales rep, etc., but let'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.

So let'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 only 325k/yr, we can do this forever.

When we sell our $700/license, let'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, handwave. So we take home an incredible $525.

We now need to sell 700 licenses year-over-year in order to keep this thing going. Not even 700 licenses one-time, 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.

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't live in that world. And that's the kind of sales process you'd need to sustainably develop a text editor.

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're well below market. If we don'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'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.

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'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).