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After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

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Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#111

Post by BoorishBears »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #108
psnehanshu wrote: post #104

When I hear Replit, I remember how the CEO tried to kill an intern's pet project. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

I am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.

I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#112

Post by Kiro »

Perenti wrote: post #15

I've seen bots promoting Replit on Steam forums of indie games. If this is the way they are marketing their product, I don't see it as having a future. What I've seen in the Dwarf Fortress forums alone makes me want to avoid the company with a 10' pole.

I find exactly one post about Replit in the DF Steam forums and it's definitely not from a bot account. Players who have just discovered vibe coding love to tell devs "just" to use something like they've been enlightened.

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#113

Post by Aeolun »

BoorishBears wrote: post #111
bigcat12345678 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.

I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.

This must be Gitlab?

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#115

Post by petre »

notarobot123 wrote: post #10
sincerely wrote: post #2

>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…

To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background". The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!

Maybe it diverted too many resources from the original goal. They fixed the issue afterwards and made a fuss about it.

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#116

Post by aidos »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #110
aidos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil’s advocate - where do you draw the line? They say they’re not going to push further into competing, but what if they did? I don’t know enough about either platform to really comment on how much of a big it is / how much they crossover. I do feel that it shows somewhat bad judgement on behalf of the intern to build something in exactly the same space as a former employer. One of the great things about so…

Well the line is law: infringing copyrights and patents. And the US law is very specific about ideas not being copyrightable, so clones are usually safe.

Yeah that’s fair - and to be clear, I’m not really defending the CEO in this case. As a founder, I was just imagining a scenario where one of our team did something similar and how I might react to it. My thoughts (and point) drifted a bit.

Serves more as a reminder to the youngsters out there that potential future hirers will use things like this to inform hiring decisions. Legal or not, your history follows you around (I’m old enough to be lucky to not have the stupid stuff I did early in my career available online). Be free, go build stuff for fun but keep clear of your employers space.

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#117

Post by shash »

vanviegen wrote: post #106
shash wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original sin was probably hiring those people for a not-yet-clear business in the first place…

Yes, let's forbid startups! /s

Yeah, the point here is nuanced, but let's do an argumentum ad absurdum instead /s

Probably the _best_ advice I got from the entire startup community is, "don't scale without PMF". The saving grace here is that they didn't scale beyond 140 people, so the damage is limited. And they didn't double down on something that would have dropped the whole thing down.

But as a founder, I'd consider it a failure of planning on my part if I had to lay off 50% of my workforce (a failure nobody is immune to, but a failure nonetheless).

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#118

Post by CuriouslyC »

Aeolun wrote: post #113
BoorishBears wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.

This must be Gitlab?

Nah, their moat is making the software as fiddly and ops heavy as possible. I really like gitlab but having set it up myself several times now, it's kinda a mess and they're not incentivized to make it decent.

Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

#120

Post by CuriouslyC »

sillyfluke wrote: post #44
ctkhn wrote: post #38

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models are good enough at coding to make coding agents useful for non-technical employees Replit is targeting, why can't either of those companies use their AI to build a wrapper around their product as good or better than Replit? Has this guy never taken n -> infinity in a problem before?

OpenAI taking an interest wouldn't be so bad for Replit. Since YC boasts that being incestuous is an upside of YC, ie selling your product to other YC companies, it is possible that OpenAI does the decent thing an outright buys Replit. It is rather likely that Altman and Masad have some sort of relationship going back to their YC days.

Replit has a lot of "value" that's actually dead weight that's going to fall by the wayside as AI gets better and humans move out of the loop. Cursor and the IDE agent companies have the same problem. They need to cannibalize their products to build for the fully autonomous engineering future, but I'm 95% certain that they won't, and the business that DO focus on full automation and moving the human out of the loop will eat their lunch.
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