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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

dylanhuang.com

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#51

Post by gkoberger »

deadbabe wrote: post #48

Has there ever been a scenario where someone gave up on a startup, dumped the code, then someone picked it up and turned it into a successful business?

This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/)

A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#52

Post by spullara »

gortok wrote: post #25

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us beli…

It just doesn't make any sense when you can go to work for a big company and get that kind of outcome without all the risk.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#53

Post by giraffe_lady »

cj wrote: post #47
mediaman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people even think about selling $10/mo licenses. Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. Customer problem discovery is easier, you get reputation network effects within the vertical, you gain trust because you learn the industry lingo, you can actually solve peoples' problems b…

> Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. I’ve successfully done exactly this. Except in order to get there, we had to spend 3-4 years selling cheap $29/mo self-serve plans at volume to iron out all of the kinks in the product and UX. Only after that were we able to go upmarket selling $40-90k/yr con…

Yeah exactly. You can't just roll out of bed one morning and grustle out a stable enterprise application. Also:

> customers paying $20k/yr or more have extremely high expectations across the board.

They definitely do, in certain ways. But also a lot of the software companies use sucks shit. But this part of the other comment cracked me up.

> a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software

This is actually how to do it but the thing they're leaving out is that you have to already have knowledge of the specific industry and its players, their niches, and the software they use within them. You have to know where standards are high, and where the current options are bad, and how to market that improvement to the companies that are juuuust flexible enough to switch to your product while being conservative enough not to dump you if exactly one VP leaves.

Once you have all that in place, sure, you can "just" sell your software to them lol.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#54

Post by liontwist »

bachmeier wrote: post #37
ed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a subtext here of “see? I told you it was hard!” Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google instead of a Basecamp. They’re different kinds of company. If anything it’s easy to underestimate the risk of building a low-risk business. They’re all hard. Kudos to Konfig!

> Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google Sure there is. The probability of success is as good as zero. In all seriousness, a better business model is buying $1000 a month in lottery tickets. You have the same chance of success, you can do it on the side while working your job, and if you do hit the jackpot you don't have to do any additional work. This particular business has no path to being a Google but i…

Your mental model of startups is a lottery?

Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”.

Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#55

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

liontwist wrote: post #54
bachmeier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google Sure there is. The probability of success is as good as zero. In all seriousness, a better business model is buying $1000 a month in lottery tickets. You have the same chance of success, you can do it on the side while working your job, and if you do hit the jackpot you don't have to do any additional work. This particular business has no path to being a Google but i…

Your mental model of startups is a lottery? Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”. Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.

There is rather a lot of probability involved, and the odds change dramatically depending on the kind of business you’re trying to launch.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#56

Post by bachmeier »

liontwist wrote: post #54
bachmeier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google Sure there is. The probability of success is as good as zero. In all seriousness, a better business model is buying $1000 a month in lottery tickets. You have the same chance of success, you can do it on the side while working your job, and if you do hit the jackpot you don't have to do any additional work. This particular business has no path to being a Google but i…

Your mental model of startups is a lottery? Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”. Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.

> Your mental model of startups is a lottery?

No, but that's how anyone should think about startups that are "Google or nothing". Not even Google started that way.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#57

Post by bwood »

As a customer of Konfig, I am super bummed about this. I think we may even have been their first customer (referenced in the init commit). Dylan and Anh-Tuan solved a number of real problems for us, and they did it spectacularly. They essentially provided a one-stop-shop for generated SDKs and beautiful hosted docs/tutorials that would call our API and immediately allow users to start playing with real data. Prior to Konfig, we were hand-writing a hodgepodge of SDKs to wrap our API and using ReadMe to host the docs (which never quite worked interactively with our API due to request signing that we require on our API).

We're self-hosting the docs now thanks to Konfig open-sourcing it: https://docs.snaptrade.com/

Tons of respect for these guys and I wish they'd found a way to make it work.

Also, for anyone finding themselves in a similar situation as Konfig (a product that (some? most? all?) customers love, but revenue not scaling as needed), please consider charging more. We probably would have paid 2-3x what Konfig was charging us and more as we grow, but they never asked and never built in any usage-based cost scaling (like $X/month/SDK, $Y/month/demo, etc).

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#58

Post by palmfacehn »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #53
cj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. I’ve successfully done exactly this. Except in order to get there, we had to spend 3-4 years selling cheap $29/mo self-serve plans at volume to iron out all of the kinks in the product and UX. Only after that were we able to go upmarket selling $40-90k/yr con…

Yeah exactly. You can't just roll out of bed one morning and grustle out a stable enterprise application. Also: > customers paying $20k/yr or more have extremely high expectations across the board. They definitely do, in certain ways. But also a lot of the software companies use sucks shit. But this part of the other comment cracked me up. > a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software This i…

>This is actually how to do it but the thing they're leaving out is that you have to already have knowledge of the specific industry and its players, their niches, and the software they use within them.

In most cases, this requires at least one former employee who used the crummy software. Most likely this person would be the one to identify the problem and propose an alternative solution.

Information like this is extremely valuable. It forms the core of the biz opportunity. Casual comments often overlook this.

Builders doing their own thing may not overlap with employees using office horror software 9-5.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#59

Post by firesteelrain »

dools wrote: post #26
williamstein wrote: post #5

> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

Isn't this entire thing what WSDL and SOAP was promising in the early 2000s?

I only remember converting WSDLs to Java.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#60

Post by livearchivist »

gkoberger wrote: post #49

Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things.…

This was super wholesome and made my day
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