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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

#141

Post by throw__away7391 »

confidantlake wrote: post #135
dagw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.

> Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it

Citation seriously needed. There is no argument here, merely a demonstrably false statement. A large company is literally the only kind of entity that is capable of creating entire categories of value which make up a huge percentage of the global economy. Furthermore, a lot of what many, many small businesses are doing, especially very profitable ones, is directly enabled by and entirely dependent on the existence of large businesses.

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

#142

Post by cushychicken »

dagw wrote: post #124
Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> 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 […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

> In the US they may very well think of that as failure, especially if they are VC funded

Man, if anything, this is the part that’s weird.

There’s this very weird undercurrent of keeping track of who is “winning” in the US.

Is it not possible that someone who shepherds a hypergrowth startup to IPO, is just as of much a winner as the bootstrapped founder who has a profitable, sustainable business with a handful of employees?

I get it - everyone wants to win. But in hyper focusing on winning, you may lose sight of the fact that there’s lots of ways to win.

The last part of this comment is the last part of Jerry Maguire, because I think Jerry’s mentor Dicky Fox has the right idea about this:

”Hey, I don't have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success.”

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

#143

Post by ccppurcell »

fourseventy wrote: post #139
confidantlake wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.

Did you use an iPhone to type this?

Everything apart from the look of the iPhone is value created by publicly funded organisations, with the exception of the transistor which was developed by at&t. And at&t were effectively a government sponsored monopoly at the time. So apple extracted value, I would argue.

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

#144

Post by ozim »

Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> 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 […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

I am in Europe and I work for a company that has exactly the same struggles.

Sales cycles for B2B for big players are insane - price points to offer our stuff to small/medium businesses are not enough.

Even if we provide value and save time for customers it still is hard work all the times to explain the value.

Well the grass is greener on the other side - but I can see how having B2B business where for years you have the same struggles just to keep the lights on and every month is the same and you have the same conversations but with different customers explaining 10x a year exactly the same thing - why you provide the value —— is just something people don’t want to get stuck into and can lead to burnout rather quickly.

So I can see how someone would like to land business idea where the value is obvious and people scream „take my money”.

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

#145

Post by motorest »

confidantlake wrote: post #135
dagw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.

> I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.

I agree, but from a different point of view. Companies put out products and services aligned with their strategies. In large companies, you build up strategies that spread across multiple domains. This means that product managers need to enforce constraints that will go well beyond the concerns of the use base of their specific product. That is a net loss for the customer as the product/service they once loved is now a way to force-feed them things they do not want or care about.

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

#146

Post by gizmo »

sfjailbird wrote: post #115
mediaman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's gotta be a name for this fallacy. "This enterprise software sucks and is extremely expensive, so we will build something that is actually good and become billionaires!" This is the graveyard of engineer driven startups in the enterprise space, who make the mistake of thinking that software quality matters. The fact is it is not a top priority, if it is even a priority at all. In the enterprise space, if you'r…

The world has changed. Today you can sell software for $5000 or $10000 without any sales process. Not always of course, you have to find the right niche.

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

#147

Post by pas »

confidantlake wrote: post #135
dagw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

I would argue it is less healthy for the economy. Large companies are very good at extracting value, not necessarily producing it.

There's an optimum point. Too small is bad[1], too big is bad (too big to fail, regulatory capture, and sales driving out product[2]).

[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...

[2] Steve Jobs quote: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...]"

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #49

Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things.…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by jillesvangurp »

ianpurton wrote: post #106

The developer tools market is REALLY difficult. Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]". No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.

Selling tools to developers is just hard. You are competing with a lot of OSS tools that are constantly adapting and changing. Any good ideas quickly get picked up and replicated. So, most commercial tools have a limited shelf life in terms of utility. Which makes them mostly just nice to haves.

There's a secondary problem here that many developers are employed and don't typically have a personal tools budget. This narrows the market effectively to developers that are free lancing or the bosses of developers that are employees.

The team managers will scrutinize a lot of spending on this front and typically not have. a lot of budget for this. And there is no such thing as a personal tools budget for developers in most companies.

Freelancers mostly just use the same tools as the companies that pay them. Which is mostly free tools. Non free tools actually complicate getting freelancers because now you need to worry about getting licenses for your contractors as well. So, there's a bias towards keeping things simple here and just avoiding such tools.

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

#150

Post by mcnichol »

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand kudos to them for the self-reflection, facing hard truths, and building a really wide set of tools.

But when you look under the hood it's tooling that wraps tooling. The API categorization tool arguably hands off a large portion of the heavy lifting to OpenAI.

"You are a world class categorizer. Fit these APIs into one of these groups."

The rest of the file is just wiring and a little blurring of the lines of model, view, and controller. I saw some testing and was like, okay this is going to be important if you are wrapping a lot of tooling because "change outside of your control" but then it's just a the default contextLoads() functional test Intellij gives that makes sure dependencies exist and nothing fails at compile.

I think the vision is there and it is definitely aligned to the Pareto principle but it feels like the idea was tested that markets aren't interested in maintaining their stuff while internally they haven't even addressed maintaining their own stuff.

Feels like a Catch 22 where if they could address that reason for themselves first then they could probably solve that for other people. But addressing it means having a product that is being used in order to feel the pain and empathize with the end user.

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