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RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

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Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#71

Post by nojvek »

RethinkDB was great. They had better tech than mongodb. It was fast and consistent, rql was expressive and easy to lean. Sharding and replicas was easy.

I wish they didn’t run out of money and give up. In many ways startups feel like you gotta be a cockroach. The goal is to not die and live long enough to be profitable where you control your own destiny.

Like mongo atlas, rethinkdb’s hosted solution (horizon I think) could have easily taken off.

Like Firebase’s Firestore, it could have been quite successful.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#72

Post by maaarghk »

spolsky-wisdom wrote: post #48
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an a…

On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#73

Post by mraza007 »

akulkarni wrote: post #58
mraza007 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my favorite comment and I totally agree with you and more you talk to different people the more you discover and that discovery leads to some of the best ideas. Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product

Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product This is tricky - there is no one right answer. I would start by building something that you need ("scratch your own itch" as some people say). It's much easier to build the right thing when you need that thing. But also good to "sanity check" your instincts by checking in with people whom you respect and whom you think will understand the marke…

Hey I totally agree with you and thanks for the advise I really appreciate as I’m currently early in my career and have been thinking about alot of ideas just need to put those ideas into execution and try to see what works and what doesn’t

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#74

Post by toolslive »

I distinctly remember their creative hiring tactics: They anonymously floated mysterious puzzles across the web. The solution was a domain name which had a static website yielding an email address. If you sent a email to that address they immediately asked you if you were interested in working for them. I know, because I solved one (The lure to solve the mystery was just too tempting to resist)

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#75

Post by cpufry »

gigatexal wrote: post #67

What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…

lol i didnt realise those tweets were deleted. that guy usually doubles down.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#77

Post by glangdale »

tdeck wrote: post #62
Godel_unicode wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.

Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.

Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else:

'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.'

https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#79

Post by antman »

alexashka wrote: post #20
plorkyeran wrote: post #13

With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo... ), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we…

MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.

HN consesus!=Market consesus

Reality!=Market consensus (startups that lost their data using the first versions of mongo)

More often: HN consensus=Reality

At least ES had the decency to tell you it might lose your data.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#80

Post by mike_d »

toolslive wrote: post #74

I distinctly remember their creative hiring tactics: They anonymously floated mysterious puzzles across the web. The solution was a domain name which had a static website yielding an email address. If you sent a email to that address they immediately asked you if you were interested in working for them. I know, because I solved one (The lure to solve the mystery was just too tempting to resist)

Google did this in 2002(?). I remember billboards in downtown Seattle with no text or logo other than [math problem].com.
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