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A Failed SaaS Postmortem

mattlayman.com

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Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#121

Post by chii »

madamelic wrote: post #107
marcosdumay wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you'll spend some 2 days setting all services, testing, setting backups and alerts, testing again. Add another day if you want redundancy. And then, every 4 to 8 months you'll spend some 2 hours making sure everything is working right and up to date. If you get into another user-base class (like, from 100 to 1000, or from 1000 to 10000), you will spend all those 3 days again. Compare that with cloud services, wh…

And building on barebones keeps all options open. If you go big and realize an IaaS solution is right, great, you are ready to go on to IaaS with no trouble If you IaaS from the beginning, you've cornered yourself and have to build your way out.

How are these scenarios any different from each other?

You are not ready to go IaaS with no trouble if you've already built your own. It's just as hard to do that as going from IaaS to your own custom infrastructure!

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#122

Post by herokai71726373 »

tnolet wrote: post #74
jjice wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I've been doing something wrong now. For my personal web apps, I've always just installed Nginx, Let's Encrypt, and then a docker image of my application/DB. Spinning this up on a fresh Ubuntu Server install takes less than a half hour if I had to guess. Nginx to force TLS and proxy pass to my docket image. I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could b…

Heroku does that in 3 minutes. And maintains & updates that stack for you. And gives you deployment automation etc. For $7 a month.

Stay away from Heroku. The team has recently all moved over to work on Salesforce Evergreen and is only barely keeping the lights on.

Source: I worked there for years until very recently for this reason.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#123

Post by karmakaze »

omarhaneef wrote: post #27

I don't develop web apps for a living but even I would have thought the obvious solution is to first get v1.0 up in Rails/Django or whatever you know and then try new frameworks etc. Actually, if you want it to be a business, the first step would be just use something else out there. Buy > Customize > Build It would have been interesting to see what his wife uses at the moment. I think he could have given her functio…

The "Buy > Customize > Build" logic holds for supporting software. When it comes to the core of your business, Buy is usually not an option and also doesn't give you a competitive advantage. Also the effort of Customize can often be greater than the Build path in short order. I've experienced this with one startup that thought that it made sense to customize a Drupal CMS for a bespoke experience with hybrid human/ML curation.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#124

Post by spookthesunset »

hnzix wrote: post #115
sjy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people create rats nests using frameworks, too. Would forcing the “most senior but not the smartest” person to use a framework they don’t like really have fixed your problems?

A framework at least encourages a coherent pattern.

Even non-framework people make frameworks. Just implicitly. At least a marginally good “real” one probably had somebody think hard about it and a great one has a community around it with plenty of devs that can jump right in on your project. All of them will have better documentation and you can get questions answered on stackoverflow. No such luck with the ivory tower anti-framework bozo’s pet framework.

God I’ve worked for too many startups where some “anti-framework” bozo declared frameworks as unneeded bloat.

Avoid these startups at all cost cause whoever hired the anti framework bozo is also a bozo and whoever hired that bozo is also a bozo. Fish rots from the top.

Not a good look for a startup with more important things to do than pushing far-out technology agendas.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#125

Post by wolco »

jahbrewski wrote: post #43
Eikon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say building a business has nothing to do with the product. The issue is when the focus is _only_ on the product and no effort is done on business development, market research, marketing... Garbage is an harder sell than outstanding especially with limited resources. However, if "outstanding" means "I think they'll throw money at it, I just have to wait", you've got a problem.

In no way am I saying the business has _nothing_ to do with the product. Simply that it’s probably far less than the developer in many of us wants to accept.

The product is the second or third or fourth most important thing. The language not important. Being upto date on package the least important.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#126

Post by wolco »

spookthesunset wrote: post #95
irq11 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc.” Oh come on. It takes maybe an afternoon of work to do everything you’ve described. Let’s say you’re utterly clueless about all aspects of sysadmin, and you need to learn how to do it from scratch: 2-3 days, tops. No matter how much you pad the schedule…

> or you’re just being lazy LOL. Good developers are the most lazy people on the planet. Laziness is a virtue, not a sin! If my developer told me our company could outsource all our sysadmin tasks to some third party I'd be a fool to not listen. If I was a developer and my boss called me lazy for trying to help the company move faster (which is far more important for a startup than saving a few bucks) because boss-pe…

Great developers are not lazy. They close brackets and leave no debt. They are lazy in the sense that they implement the least features required because they know the pitfalls of over developing. They are lazy because they leave at 5 but only after finishing their work.

A great developer doesn't ask his boss to hire a third party to manage the server. They ask the boss to hire someone in house because getting anything non-basic done over trouble tickets is a non-starter. A great developer can handle pinching pennies because they use open source at home.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#127

Post by ericb »

3pt14159 wrote: post #78
ericb wrote: post #8

We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…

I have a couple of questions for you: 1. Was your Rails app solely an API or did it also serve HTML/CSS on first load? 2. Did you build a reusable component framework for your Ember app? 3. Did you follow something like JSON API[0] and use EmberData to hook into it? I've found that Ember apps with a Rails backend API actually fit together pretty nicely. Don't get me wrong, I like simple. I don't even have a single li…

1. Yes, just API/SPA 2. Yes 3. Yes

The decision is purely pragmatic, not about taste, purity, or anything else. If I can develop faster up to the point where I have the budget to worry about those other concerns, that would be a win.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#128

Post by ibeckermayer »

ericb wrote: post #30
Aperocky wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need jquery either, native JS works just fine for most simple interactions like startup apps. Time to say no to npm and packages like is_odd that somehow are depended on by thousands of packages. A sign of collective hysteria.

Totally agree you don't need jQuery. My criteria for inclusion was "does it make our development even slightly faster, on balance." The answer was yes in this case. Perhaps that's just the familiarity of it, but at the end of the day, faster is faster. I'd say my new philosophy is: let our competitors optimize for purity or trendiness or even render time while we optimize for development speed.

Look here son you don’t need jQuery. Go outside, dig up some Silicon, bake up some wafers, design and manufacture a cpu, strap it to a motherboard, hand-smelt some housing, throw some coal in the generator, write an OS, handcraft a browser, and use plain vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. Fucking kids these days with their _frameworks_

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#129

Post by wolco »

Alex3917 wrote: post #71
briandoll wrote: post #2

The main point here seems to be that the failure to build a SaaS product is blamed in part on the compounding technical debt incurred due to a fast-moving software ecosystem and the effort involved in keeping up. The point I think most people should consider instead, is that building an app is not the same thing as building a business. Building the app is comparably easy, once you've proven that you understand the ma…

> The app, it turns out, is the easy part. I dunno, I don't know anything about self-driving cars, but when the people making self-driving car SaaS say the software part is difficult I tend to be inclined to believe them. Even if these sorts of entrepreneurship cliches are true in most cases, I don't think it's a good idea to use them to write people off without doing any critical thinking.

One person is making a self driving car company in the evenings and weekends and you think the software will be the hardest part? Someone could figure out the software perhaps but selling it to an existing car company would be near impossible but less impossible compared to creating brand new car company and getting them certified in a state.

Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem

#130

Post by cddotdotslash »

marcosdumay wrote: post #88
spookthesunset wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head.…

Yes, you'll spend some 2 days setting all services, testing, setting backups and alerts, testing again. Add another day if you want redundancy. And then, every 4 to 8 months you'll spend some 2 hours making sure everything is working right and up to date. If you get into another user-base class (like, from 100 to 1000, or from 1000 to 10000), you will spend all those 3 days again. Compare that with cloud services, wh…

This comment reads as if you worked with the cloud in 2009 and haven't been back since. It doesn't take a week to setup a service. In fact, you could spin up everything you need in maybe an afternoon to get you a fully-working, TLS-backed API and website. From that point forward, everything is fully managed and you don't need to deal with Let's Encrypt binaries and stdout logs, etc.

Your first paragraph is exactly what the OP of the article did who is now writing about how it failed.

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