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Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

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Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#31

Post by doobiaus »

My short answer is, go with what you know, it's better to have a solid working product than a flakey pile of learner spaghetti.

I'm a .net dude at a startup though and to be fair long term costs should be factored in, but can be mitigated. For one BizSpark is an absolute must to get started, and once you graduate there are the Action Packed for a few hundred dollars a year.

I would however suggest you look rather at using oss where possible even from . Net. We have used MySQL, Mongodb and redis on Linux because it keeps scaling costs down, and to be frank they' re better supported on the platform.

We also leverage BitBucket and TeamCity rather than TFS for cost reasons.

Having said that both Azure and AWS have fairly scalable windows and SQL hosting services.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#32

Post by allegory »

justin66 wrote: post #29
allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

> Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. Oracle? SAP?

It works out about the same as Oracle now from SQL 2012. Azure is the only way to cut costs but the managed SQL services are awful. Both are equally hassle-some. SAP is different - you're not paying for a product, you're paying for consultants on subscription and a product...

Oracle tooling I.e. JDK, Netbeans, Oracle Linux (repackaged RHEL) etc is 100% free. VS isn't.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#33

Post by hvidgaard »

allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

Most dev licensing are covered with an Action Pack for less than 500$, and once you gain some traction as a Silver Partner. SQL Server, while expensive, isn't that bad compared to similar supported RDMS, and in any case, nothing prevents you from using a free RDMS in place.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#35

Post by allegory »

hvidgaard wrote: post #33
allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

Most dev licensing are covered with an Action Pack for less than 500$, and once you gain some traction as a Silver Partner. SQL Server, while expensive, isn't that bad compared to similar supported RDMS, and in any case, nothing prevents you from using a free RDMS in place.

We were a gold partner. There are no reasonable discounts over what you pay. Add to that the support isn't any better than the pay per incident support.

Action pack is reasonable value but you can't use it to deploy production kit on. Not only that the definition of internal use is so vague it's a risk.

We got an audit. It wasn't cheap to sort out what we thought was in compliance.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#36

Post by opless »

No investor cares about what language your product is written in. No client does either.

Use what gets the job done, think a little about scalability and modularity from the start. Don't optimise until you have plenty of data. Over thinking things like this will prevent you from the initial release.

If it works, great. But like all projects, you might have to throw away significant portions of your system away to grow. Being too tied to one specific technology will defeat you.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#37

Post by hpagey »

Try to find product/ market fit as quickly as possible. My personal rule of thumb is to find 10 paying customers before you can declare product/market fit.

The stack really doesn't matter and should be least of your concerns at this stage. I used to work for company whose stack was .NET. They got acquired a year back for 1.6 B dollars.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#38

Post by throwawayforob »

We're a company with a .net stack that is being acquired right now.

It didn't come up until their senior engineer said we should rewrite everything in Angular.js and Java. The tech management guys quickly said, "Sure, maybe, but for the foreseeable future, we will SSO between the two systems and plan for deeper integration later."

Hands on engineers care a lot about tech choices and sometimes have actual good reasons. At the business level, nobody cares as long as you can meet the business need.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#39

Post by PallarelCoedr »

pit wrote: post #14
pionar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono is, yes. If you use a non-Microsoft stack to host an ASP.NET site (OWIN, Nancy on OWIN), then even more so. Nancy+OWIN+Mono+nginx is a very good stack.

I agree, Nancy is a lot of fun to use with Mono. However, I've been stuck trying to get a WCF (older ASP.NET) application running on Mono for a while now, and it's been a huge pain.

Forget about older ASP.NET and WCF on mono. The core of ASP.NET (System.Web assembly) doesn't feature in next version of ASP.NET. WCF hasn't seen any effective development in years.

The new stuff (ASP.NET vnext) will be highly mono compatible and like the current OWIN stuff, entirely decoupled from IIS.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#40

Post by hvidgaard »

allegory wrote: post #35
hvidgaard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most dev licensing are covered with an Action Pack for less than 500$, and once you gain some traction as a Silver Partner. SQL Server, while expensive, isn't that bad compared to similar supported RDMS, and in any case, nothing prevents you from using a free RDMS in place.

We were a gold partner. There are no reasonable discounts over what you pay. Add to that the support isn't any better than the pay per incident support. Action pack is reasonable value but you can't use it to deploy production kit on. Not only that the definition of internal use is so vague it's a risk. We got an audit. It wasn't cheap to sort out what we thought was in compliance.

Of course you cannot use the software from a partner program externally. It was only concerning development licensing.
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