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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

#91

Post by froh »

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.)

the landlords beg to differ. to them it's a great country, run very competently.

private tax (rent for soil bound property is nothing but a private tax) is the best thing since aristocracy and tithing.

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

#92

Post by tugu77 »

Not every little idea, as useful as it might be, needs to turn into a hyper-growth business. Just make it an open source project on the side. If it gets popular then you get famous and hopefully some big company finds it so useful that they hire you and let you work on it full time. Konfig seems like a perfect example for this.

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

#94

Post by thecleaner »

Remarkable show of persistence. Honestly, I really like that the Repo is as-is. Congratulations on the journey, hope you learnt a ton. PS - you built some of your static content on Docusaurus, a Meta open source project. They're hiring like crazy. Maybe you get to work on that one.

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

#96

Post by reboothed »

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?

Close but not quite (and keeping some parts intentionally vague):

There was a data startup ran for ~3y until the 10 person team imploded in a tough market. Everyone left or was laid off, the office was closed, operations ceded etc. The website and some collection were still left running in zombie mode.

A couple of years later, the non-technical founder and CEO (who at this point had bought everyone else out) saw demand and PMF emerging. Mostly through serendipity, I was one of 3 people brought in to "see what we can do with it", originally intended as a 3 month project. We came in with zero context and jumped right in to figuring out the ship we were now sailing. I was able to have one or two of conversation with the previous CTO but that was about it in terms of overlap.

Things progressed and within a few months we found ourselves as co-founders of "Company v2.0". My partner took over as CEO.

I left after 2y around our series A when we were 20~30 employees and arguably a leader in our market segment. At that point there were significant and crucial parts of the stack and codebase inherited (and evolved obv) from the original efforts by the previous team. The company is now an established brand, have offices in several countries and had a successful series B last year.

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

#97

Post by j45 »

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…

Using B2C pricing for B2B SaaS is a big headwind.

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

#98

Post by cess11 »

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…

Did you try to use https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator directly?

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

#99

Post by BartjeD »

lazide wrote: post #72
liontwist wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are zooming out, and when you look at an abstraction from a distance it's easy to miss the details and just boil it down to probablities.

The reality is that you measure and get information on all of these things to determine more accurately what odds you have. The act of measurement changes the probabilities, because if you do it right you will know more than you did before.

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

#100

Post by ericjmorey »

tptacek wrote: post #29
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…

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.

> 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 only look towards people like Peter Thiel, sure. But the people that cleaned up his mess with SVB aren't so insane.

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