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

dylanhuang.com

161–170 of 284 posts

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

#161

> 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…

[dead]

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

#162

> 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…

What's weird is wasting your time and life on something not worth your time.

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

#163
post #124

> 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…

This is the problem with VC culture: it's not funding good, sustainable ideas, it's basically betting.

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

#164
post #124

> 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…

> 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.

was it? Or the inability of other countries to block US startups (because the US government will never let them) makes it impossible for local startups to compete leading to monopolies? If every country went US way of blocking TikTok, the hyper-scale growth would cease to exist fast.

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

#165
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…

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

> we need big companies to make GPUs, probably.

we definitely don't need trillion dollar companies selling ads.

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

#166
post #98
post #57

As a customer of Konfig, I am super bummed about this. I think we may even have been their first customer (referenced in the init commit). Dylan and Anh-Tuan solved a number of real problems for us, and they did it spectacularly. They essentially provided a one-stop-shop for generated SDKs and beautiful hosted docs/tutorials that would call our API and immediately allow users to start playing with real data. Prior to…

Did you try to use https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator directly?

There are multiple open-source tools backed by large companies to do this. I use one of them for my sdks. So I can really understand how they could struggle to sell it, it's a hard sale to sell someone a commercial product that does pretty much the same as free open-source projects. I was tempted to check it out but as bad as it sounds even with it being open source and free I couldn't find a reason to spend the time over just using what I have now.

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

#167
post #97

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…

Using B2C pricing for B2B SaaS is a big headwind.

Recipe for your SaaS always being a hobby

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

#168
post #108
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I’ve successfully done exactly this. Except in order to get there, we had to spend 3-4 years selling cheap $29/mo self-serve plans at volume to iron out all of the kinks in the product and UX. Only after that were we able to go upmarket selling $40-90k/yr con…

True and what I find funny is that the same companies are often willing to pay a lot of money to consultants that will deliver a shitty streamlit POC. Like they will literally pay consultants the equivalent of 4 years of new SaaS cost to get a POC instead of using a product with rough edges and grow with it. Expectations can be really dumb and confusing.

I'd pay to buy a bad house and then spend money to improve it, rather than paying a full rent for the same bad house and hoping that the landlord uses that money to improve it.

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

#169
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try to use https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator directly?

There are multiple open-source tools backed by large companies to do this. I use one of them for my sdks. So I can really understand how they could struggle to sell it, it's a hard sale to sell someone a commercial product that does pretty much the same as free open-source projects. I was tempted to check it out but as bad as it sounds even with it being open source and free I couldn't find a reason to spend the time…

The product in TFA is a wrapper around the tool I linked, plus some stuff for docs and so on.

Wrapping free software is mainly viable towards enterprise customers, where the thing you're actually selling is SLA and a certain level of insurance and sexiness on middle manager CV:s and so on.

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

#170
post #124

> 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…

What big prize? Having way more money than I know what to do with? I genuinely don't get what the reward even means to me as a human here
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