Lessons from a Startup Pivot

Hey! I'm the author of this blog post. If you have any questions, let me know!

One of the lessons I omitted (because the post was getting a bit long), is we started off as cross-platform (Slack, Teams, and Discord) but in the end we decided to focus on a single product.

In retrospect, we've struggled to decide if that's a lesson to learn. Should we have started with a single platform? It certainly makes it much faster to build for a single platform. But at the time, we really thought the cross-platform chat-ops would be a distinguishing trait!

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the post!

direct thoughts:

> Balance your early engineering and infrastructure with achieving Product Market Fit

No, not really, you should focus way more on the latter really. We devs love the first tho. e.g. comment from your original post 12mo ago: "Super stoked to see you launching after working on it for so long!" -> how much of the code you've written was necessary to come to the realization you eventually came to? Based on the way you described your trouble selling, seems like very little to none.

- Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity lolwut)

- corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you worked. Seems like your original idea was heavily based on something u saw internally. Just because something works well at one (usually large) company you worked at doesn't mean it serves a widespread market need (I've been burned by this).

Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!

Great article and very informative..!!

Sure! Because of my background in .NET, it made sense to stick with what I know. I don't believe the tech stack makes or breaks a product (unless you choose egregiously poorly). A product's success is primarily determined by how well you hit product market fit.

That being said, a good stack that you know well can affect how quickly you build and how quickly you can adapt the product to changing market conditions.

So here's what we use:

- ASP.NET CORE( - Primarily ASP.NET Razor Pages for the web app. ASP.NET MVC Controllers for the internal and external APIs we support.

- C# - We try to stay on the latest version. The recent pattern matching improvements alone make our code so much cleaner.

- [HTMX](https://htmx.org/)\* - for front-end. We're not at the point where we feel we need a heavyweight front-end framework like React. We like the 37signals approach of shipping "HTML over the wire". We're also big on Web Components. That's a result of our [GitHub heritage](https://github.blog/2021-05-04-how-we-use-web-components-at-...).

- TypeScript - for our front-end JS. This is a recent addition. Most of our JS is still ES6.

- Azure Database for PostgreSql - PostgreSql is rock solid and great for storing all kinds of data.

- Azure Functions - we support three types of custom code skills that customers can use to enhance and customize the bot : JavaScript, C#, and Python. We run these in Azure Functions.

- App Insights - We use this for logging.

- Azure Managed Grafana - We have a nice Grafana dashboard based off our App Insights logs that helps us get a birds-eye view of how everything is doing.

- Azure App Configuration - For feature flags.

As you can see, it's pretty heavily Microsoft based. Part of that is my background. The other part is we got a lot of Azure Credits when we joined the [Microsoft for Startups](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups?rtc=1) program. So it made fiscal sense for us to stick with Azure.

I do like that we can manage everything in a single portal. But some of these tools are not best-in-breed as we will be looking at other options down the road.

Exactly. We still think the underlying platform has value, but we have to prove the product first. Then maybe later we can also sell the platform.