If the customer relationship is sticky and product/technology improves over time, it is more important to be quick than "mature" or "feature complete". When the technology matures (roughly simultaneously for all competitors), the size of the user base is what matters.
RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
121–130 of 237 posts
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#122It failed because megacorps didn't like the idea of a database which could allow startups to scale from zero to hundreds of millions of users out of the box. Anyone who's had any affiliation with projects which aim for 'out of the box' scalability will know that these projects are actively suppressed and starved of funding and customers by corporate interests.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#123What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be…
Bizarre. I don't know how much of a distraction "I hired a hot girl and then fell in love with her" was, but to me tweeting 40-60 times per day says more about a lack of focus (e.g. 56 times on 30th November 2020 where that tweet came from). The deleted tweets don't go back to 2017 but if that level of tweeting is normal I wonder where he found time to do anything, let alone build a database company.
That said, I'm wasting time on HN currently. But I'm also on holiday.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.
> I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you. Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use. A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of pa…
Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me.
I agree though that you should never sell to developers, most of them really don't care how they spend their time as long as they are occupied and work on something they deem interesting, so they will happily spend months or years reinventing existing solutions if given the opportunity (I've seen this again and again). You need to sell to the people that run the company and pay the developers or to the engineering management, because they know how much their developers cost, and they understand ROI better than they do. That said often developers are quite creative when making up reasons why not to use an external solution or tool and instead write it themselves, so whether you succeed in selling to a company depends on who's ultimately in charge of technology.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mongodb-inc-announc... - Revenue: Total revenue was $150.8 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, an increase of 38% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $144.1 million, an increase of 39% year-over-year, and services revenue was $6.7 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year. - Gross Profit: Gross profit was $104.7 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, representin…
MongoDB Atlas's business model seems very, very odd to me. The prices for hosted Mongo are so high that I really find myself asking who is paying for this and what the target market is. In particular I wonder how they can possibly be losing money when charging such insane markups unless they have virtually no customers. For a dedicated database that has 32 GB of RAM, 8 virtualised CPUs, and only 160GB of storage you…
> So how do the economics of this work out? Can anyone explain to me?
Idk, but maybe the engineers don't fully trust it, so they outsource the liability of running it with some contractual guarantees. And at the moment, this probably looks more fashionable, so no one dares question it in fear of seeming backwards.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.
Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else: 'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.' https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...
Unless one works for boring corporations, it might not work for glam blog posts, fame and fortune, but I get to keep my teeth.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.
I have used Mongo for 9 years. First at a game company, then for several prototypes that made it to production in my current role. We have not lost data once. Many of my friends at medium-sized companies use Mongo for much larger projects and have not lost data a single time, either. And it is it not just me and my friends -- HSBC recently announced they are moving 65 of its relational databases to mongodb. I am not…
> All of that said, I work in an innovation space where we throw a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks, and our time-to-prototype is often a few months at most. For us, it has been a godsend, but our situation is rather unique.
The very RAD reasons you note regarding Mongo also encourage Mongo Cancer (tm).
What is Mongo Cancer you ask? It is the phenomena where Mongo use is manifest from API to home-grown "relational logic" in business tier. This simply doesn't happen with any other NoSQL DB afaik, but Mongo Cancer uniquely marches right up to the user's face in the API.
> I think if you have separated your concerns well-enough, it is okay developing in Mongo while leaving yourself a path to postgresql or something else.
I'll hold you to that "I think" and assume you have never actually done this.
Because Mongo Cancer patients typically love the RAD aspect of grabing JSON hot off the http stack and shoving it in the "database", touching every API in the way. The last M.C. project I saw required effectively a rebuild to actually swap the misused Mongo.
tldr; Mongo Cancer is very easy to catch but requires very expensive surgery to cure.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#128is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad? developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.
It's great market but things are very competitive. If you are starting a business, you won't succeed unless you bring some unique value to the table.
Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support.
RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product.
Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work.
In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have used Mongo for 9 years. First at a game company, then for several prototypes that made it to production in my current role. We have not lost data once. Many of my friends at medium-sized companies use Mongo for much larger projects and have not lost data a single time, either. And it is it not just me and my friends -- HSBC recently announced they are moving 65 of its relational databases to mongodb. I am not…
> All of that said, I work in an innovation space where we throw a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks, and our time-to-prototype is often a few months at most. For us, it has been a godsend, but our situation is rather unique. The very RAD reasons you note regarding Mongo also encourage Mongo Cancer (tm). What is Mongo Cancer you ask? It is the phenomena where Mongo use is manifest from API to home-grown "r…
No, we have migrated prototypes to redshift. You just need to keep your database logic in a separate layer, which is something one should do anyway. I say "I think" because I agree with you that most will not. If you implement mongo such that you will be stuck on mongo, then do not use it. You always want to have a layer that handles your database operations, with any database, but obviously you are safer in SQL-land as switching costs are lower.
I do not think the "cancer" metaphor is valuable here. What you describe are bad ideas that I agree are bad ideas but really one has to know the tool they are using and what it is bad at.
I think the thing you describe can happen but that is just poor planning more than anything. Why does the database have anything to do with the design of your API layer? That sounds bonkers. And I would not blame the underlying database tech. I would blame the implementer.
But really, please consider that many of us have, or are as we speak, losing loved ones to a deadly sickness which you have compared to a poor database implementation.
Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
#130Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…
I don’t know if this is a corollary, but when I try to come up with an example of someone getting rich selling databases, I think of companies known more for their sales than their engineering.
Or for their predatory anticompetitive behaviour?