I don't agree that the only way to make a company is to build something small and iterate. It's just one way, not better nor worse than other ways. Some companies have succeeded doing this, other have not. Which means that the point of the blog post is basically wrong. Don't "build something small and iterate", build the product that you have in mind that you think people will want - that might be big and need lots of functionality or it might be small with minimal functionality.
Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality.
Survivor bias.
It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.
I think it goes without saying this is not the only way you can build a sucessfull company.
There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs.
Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding.
Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind.
But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.
Hootsuite was absolutely a little snowball. Invoke Labs was an agency in Vancouver that build Ow.ly (a link shortener that's still around). They then continued to build an early ver of Hootsuite to manage their clients' social media campaigns. Then they realized that other people might want it and offered a free version. I had dinner with the founder the night before they turned on their paid plans, and he was unsure what the reception would be since they gave so much to so many people for free.
The reception was somewhat positive but they continued to grow and sell the crap out of Hootsuite and now it's on track to go public. But they started SUPER small.
Microsoft actuallly were a classic snowball in their first few years with MS BASIC.
Then, in 1981, they took the snowball and threw it smack dab into that huge towering snow slab they had noticed called the IBM PC, causing an avalanche of hitherto unknown proportions...the rest is history. :)
Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality.
Survivor bias.
It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.