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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you start making a product and trying to sell it when do the dice rolls come in?

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

#62
post #26

> “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?

And Ruby on Rails

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

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your monthly nut That means... something different where I come from. Are you using it to mean "monthly fixed costs"? I haven't come across that meaning before.

It's a gambling term, it means the amount you have to win to break even.

it's a loan sharking term, every week you hold the nut, you owe the vig

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

Boiled down into 1 sentence: Create a company that solves a problem you’ve personally experienced.

(If you feel like you haven’t experienced any problems worth creating a company to fix, consider putting yourself in situations where you’ll be exposed to different/new problem sets)

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

#65
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…

Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well.

This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales prospect are a lot better than at the start of the year. So I'm expecting to have another strong year of growth next year. Also we are nowhere near saturating the market and can have strong growth for many years to come.

Salary + 1/3 of profits is equal to 100k for this year. 40% growth doubles the company every 2 years, If everything goes well just salary + profits will grow very nicely. Then on top of this come the exit opportunities where founders will make millions.

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

#66
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.

Maybe my understanding of "big company" salaries are skewed but I imagine there's a profitable middle ground between big company salary and hypergrowth? As long as one isn't taking VC money at least

On the flip side, I can't say I'm super sure what "hypergrowth" means, it's a rate of growth but I guess what really Matters is some expected valuation/market cap kinda thing

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

#67

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…

Cool, says everyone... Have you done it?

Yes. But it's not for everyone, especially not for a lot of engineers.

Many of these buyers feel more comfortable meeting you in-person, so going to trade shows, writing articles for niche trade publications, and sometimes doing site visits are all very helpful. So is cold calling.

Sales cycles are often slow. You have to get used to customers taking months to decide, having lots of meetings with different stakeholders, and to get good at telling the difference between those who need a lot of meetings but will likely close versus those who will never do anything. It's a very different game than selling subs online, which I know little about.

The product does need to be decent but I disagree with others that it has to be amazing. Most enterprise software is horrible. They will be delighted if you actually solve their problems (rather than the problems horizontally-oriented software vendors want their customers to have), even if it has some rough edges, as long as you're very customer-focused, responsive, and available.

But it also tends to be durable revenue, because you get tightly integrated into their operations if you do it right.

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

#68

Admiring your courage in dumping your repo raw and uncut.

I agree, this was a really touching admission:

> Looking back to March 2022 when I left my job to pursue this startup full-time, I have absolutely no regrets. I knew the risks—that failure was a very real possibility—but I also knew I had to take this chance. Today, even as we close this chapter, I'm grateful for the failure because it has taught me more than success ever could.

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

#69
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…

Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well. This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales…

Product and service businesses are very very very different things. Service you get immediate cashflow but the thing doesn't scale past the humans. Software scales infinitely in theory, but it takes a lot of time to build before you even get 1$ out of it.

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

#70
post #29
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…

If you need funding to cover your monthly nut, you need a plausible path to hyper-growth; the portfolio math doesn't work for investors otherwise. If you set out to build a small-scale sustainable business, and you succeed , you can avoid funding. But if you're pivoting to something entirely new mid-to-late-ways through your company, you've probably burned down most of your reserves.

> monthly nut

Strongly recommend checking urban dictionary before using that in Australia :D or you'll get some amused comments

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