RethinkDB Postmortem

One thing resonated strongly with me. When we started out many years ago someone said to me that the worst market you could go after was to target developers. Case in point - every developer who's ever put up a web site has built or thought about building a CMS. There must be thousands upon thousands of them, virtually all with a price of $0. Who would want to sell a CMS product?

We heeded that advice and I often reflect on it during the sales process when we have the "lets just run your offering past the IT team" meeting. So often, the line of questioning from the smartypants dudes in the room is all about tripping us up, finding our weak spot (I'm a techy so I get it - I think like this myself).

The best you can normally come out of that meeting with is grudging acceptance from IT that a SaaS solution should be OK, given that the business is in a rush and all, and given that IT has other priorities. (To be fair its much less like this these days, but a few years ago this was the norm).

By contrast, showing your product to a business person is a breath of fresh air. They don't want to build it themselves, they don't really care what's under the bonnet, they just want good, quick solutions to their actual problems, so they can go home at night and sit down to Netflix. HR people (our target market) are even nicer.

What's more those business people want to pay for your solution. A quick way to kill the deal is to joyously tell them "its free!". They need to understand how you get your buck at the end of the day. They'll never buy until they understand that. And the best (because its the simplest) answer is "we've got the best product, so we charge good money for it".

Think about some examples.

MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded. It's main selling point is "you don't need to learn SQL". Object databases failed and people at the time were willing to learn something new (SQL). Nowadays, who will do that?

Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". In terms of language features it's again living in the 80's - Java got generics in 2004 and Java was way behind the times. In terms of speed it's worse than Java and Rust, maybe comparable to Haskell.

And NodeJS is nothing but "write server code, no need to learn a new language". Isomorphism simply didn't work. People think Node is fast because it can do async, but Java has been able to do threaded async for 15 years.

I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres.

A lot of people don't care much about the tech, and just want to build something. If easier (for them) tech lets them, that's a win, no?

Of course... that's easy to say but harder to swallow when they end up building something, making some money, and then hiring a developer to clean up their hideous mess. I've been there too.