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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

#221

Post by taco_emoji »

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…

how is that bad for the economy?

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

#222

Post by vitro »

Well, with Latudio [1] a language learning app, we're 6 years in since the first line of code and we still haven't thrown in the towel even if we have little traction. But we still do those small little steps and hope they add up so we have a snowball big enough that it starts rolling by itself, perhaps, one day.

In my mind, I also had a thought that we would rise and be huge, but I let go of that one. Instead, we just put one foot in front of the other and what warms my heart are those stories like when a person in Uganda got so confident thanks to our app that he opened his own language school. For this it makes sense to continue.

What I want now is just to have a nice work/family balance and the app paying my bills and something extra. That would be a great start.

[1] https://www.latudio.com

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

#223

Post by rsynnott »

dools wrote: post #26
williamstein wrote: post #5

> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

Isn't this entire thing what WSDL and SOAP was promising in the early 2000s?

And CORBA before it. And so forth.

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

#224

Post by albrewer »

jefftk wrote: post #207
albrewer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation from 15 years ago to now is 33%[0]. Inflation from 30 years to now is 107%[0]. So yeah, median incomes are dropping. [0]: According to this calculator - https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

You're adjusting for inflation twice. The numbers I gave in my comment, and in the chart I linked, are after inflation adjustment. Here's the equivalent chart without inflation adjustment, which gives the (incorrect) impression of sharply rising incomes: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

You're right, and that's 100% on me for not clicking your link.

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

#225

Post by gkoberger »

anonu wrote: post #183
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.…

You might have been successful, compared to konfig, because it looks like you had an 8-year headstart. It could be that konfig was a fine idea and well executed, just not at the right time.

Maybe, but there’s a number of companies in the SDK space that popped up the past 3 years and are seemingly successful. And there were a number of companies back when we started that are no longer around.

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

#226

Post by herbturbo »

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…

Thank VCs who only exist to find a unicorn to keep their LPs investing so they can charge their 2 and 20.

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

#227

Post by samiv »

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…

Exactly.

Only engineer and product oriented types think that quality has any actual value. Unfortunately it does not, even less so if your only USP is "quality". If your products only differentiator is that it's technically better than the competitor it really needs to be 100x better in order to sway anyone's interest.

If your maximum work/effort you can put into any project is 100% which you have to allocate into fragments, the product person will put 80% into product development and 20% to marketing but a sales person will put 80% into marketing and 20% into development and unfortunately the latter will product much better results. All it needs to be is "good enough" but reaching to your target market with the right product really is the key.

The unfortunate side effect is that quality is best achieved by having the PR team write it out and put it into a snappy slogan on your product website. Done. Quality achieved.

Edit: And the above applies to your typical non-safety critical Saas, Enterprise, B2B, B2C software. And thinking back to for example the Boeing crashes it likely also applies to the the "safety critical" software/systems as well...

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

#228

Post by tpoacher »

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…

This has become a thing in academia too.

Small projects asking interesting questions will be laughed out of the room, labelled as lack of "ambition". The fact that not all interesting questions require 4-5 years and millions of dollars to be answered seems to not bother people paying the bills.

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

#229

Post by NoGravitas »

tivert wrote: post #191
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…

> If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize. And while this might be healthier for you as an individual, it's bad for the Economy. Correction: it's not bad for the economy, it's bad for the investors (the only people who matter in the whole world ). I'm sure a tremendous amount of actual value in the economy has been destroyed by VCs dema…

I've learned to mentally replace "the economy" with "rich people's yacht money" whenever I read it in an online article. Make that substitution in this article, and it makes a lot more sense.

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

#230

Post by motorest »

robertlagrant wrote: post #171
motorest wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't agree. I think this is specious reasoning fueled by a mix of cargo cult mentality and survivorship bias. Just because a hand full of startups made it all the way through to a unicorn status, and some where…

I don't think any of this is the case, and you haven't really said why. Focusing on winning big is absolutely not survivorship bias. Everyone in the 100m is aiming to be the fastest human on earth, but only one will win. That's not survivorship bias. Throwing fallacy names as insults is still just insults.

> Everyone in the 100m is aiming to be the fastest human on earth, but only one will win.

This is a mental model of how things actually work that is fundamentally wrong and out of touch with reality. In any free market economy you have multiple competing businesses operating in the same market. The world is not a 100m race. Second place can still turn an fantastic profit and make everyone rich.

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