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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

#71

Post by shusaku »

asdev wrote: post #22

Thank you for sharing. >"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 believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business." I think we are unfortunatel…

Open sourcing your code and giving up is the ultimate pivot to AI - the new models will learn what you did and someday do it better (?).

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

#72

Post by lazide »

liontwist wrote: post #61
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every step of the way.

- right product?

- right market segment?

- right marketing?

- right execution?

- right scalability post basic execution?

- right sales approach?

- right post sales approach?

All of these have 10 different paths (in reality), any of which if you take the wrong one could end up in some kind of expensive dead end or spectacular failure.

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

#73

Post by CoastalCoder »

x0x0 wrote: post #46
NetOpWibby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you need funding to cover your monthly nut You can get funding for that?!

Yes. Most of what early vc practically pays for is salaries (and a lot of that is really just a passthrough to landlords because California is an incompetent state run by incompetent people.)

I believe you just had a "whoosh" moment.

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

#74

Post by spullara »

Jarwain wrote: post #66
spullara wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

pretty hard beating riskless 500k+ TC without having equity in a hypergrowth company.

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

#75

Post by gnuly »

bwood wrote: post #57

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…

I got to know about konfig from your product itself. The docs were(maybe still are?) so good that I had to check what was behind it. It really is better than swagger/redoc.

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

#76

Post by dghlsakjg »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #39
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

"Covering your nut", or "earning your nut" basically means selling enough to cover your expenses.

I hear it some from business or sales types in the US most often.

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

#77

Post by Tostino »

mediaman wrote: post #31
Sytten wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say that but as someone trying to actually do that, it is freaking hard to commit to 3-5 years of virtually no salary to maybe get to the same outcome you would have had with a funded business. You need to sell a lot of 10$/month licenses for it to even viable to a 2-3 people startup in a developed country. There is also the cost of opportunity to consider in that.

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…

Hell, I went straight for 20k/mo (average) with my SaaS.

The key is providing a good value proposition. My software would save my customers more than they would spend on it yearly, while outsourcing $50-300k/year in salary worth of work that previously had to be done in internally (usually incorrectly).

You always need to solve an actual business problem that people are willing to pay to fix.

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

#78

Post by adastra22 »

jspiral wrote: post #23
MangoCoffee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use. This is interesting. I used to work for a mortgage start-up years ago. They built several products for banks and home builders, such as a mortgage vault and tools for signing mortgage documents online. One condition I still remember was that bank customers required us to put our code in escrow, held by lawyers, in case the comp…

i have been involved in quite a few code escrow agreements but none that were actually used. i'd be curious to hear any stories about cases where that did happen. in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup

I imagine that it is for either insurance or regulatory reasons. Someone upstream is nervous about the bank relying on a startup for its core infrastructure, and is only placated by knowing that the code is in escrow. They're not themselves programmers and don't know how useless the code would be without the institutional knowledge of the startup.
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