They need to manage a steady income of money for their product, which also includes captivating developers to target their platform.

This means adding developer evangelism to their costs, on top of the usual consumer oriented costs.

Alongside battling against Blackberry and FirefoxOS for that fourth place.

Not impossible, but very very hard with their budget.

I think there are/will be enough people who are looking to an alternative to the apple-android-(wp)-mainstream, jolla will do well imho.