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We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

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Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#31

Post by danjac »

draw_down wrote: post #9

We used “boring technology” (the stuff we happen to like) and our startup still failed.

Startups fail for a number of reasons. Success depends on removing as many of those reasons as possible. One of those reasons is building on an esoteric tech stack that, while perhaps interesting to the developers, consumes time, energy and money better spent on things like customer acquisition and retention. However even if you eliminate that one reason, there are still many other reasons that will kill your startup.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#32

Post by rkangel »

danjac wrote: post #27
jujodi wrote: post #11

Does this really happen?

Yes. Often times tech founders - especially if inexperienced - let the freedom and power of a complete greenfield project with no management oversight go to their heads. They've always wanted to build something in $cool_tech and now nothing stands in their way. That becomes the goal in itself, the business and getting customers and money being a far second. Their desires could be far more cheaply satiated with a side…

There's an alternative presentation of the same facts:

Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology.

My actual beliefs are somewhere in between. I think the 'fast moving' world of javascript frameworks is a major contributor here as almost anything you chose in the last 5 years is obsolete.

Not all tech stacks are predominantly web though. You might decide to build in Erlang/Elixir. You would be using something that's 30 years old, proven, not going out of fashion any time soon and the right tool for a lot of jobs. You'd be more productive in it than C++/Java, but that's what most enterprises would require.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#33

Post by pbiggar »

lukevp wrote: post #23

Hope this isn’t what’s happening with dark[0]. Saw the early demos and I think the concept is killer, and don’t see why they would focus on a rewrite instead of building on what they have. I never even got asked to pay for it before they pivoted? It kinda felt like giving up and going back to building something instead of marketing and selling what they had. I say this with much respect for what they built, and someo…

Hey, thanks for the mention! Happy to explain my thinking here.

Regarding marketing and selling what we have: we tried that and it's pretty clear we're missing important bits, in particular packages for common vendors (stripe, slack, etc), and a package for user management, as well as common things like validation. People love the concept (as do you, thanks!), but were struggling to build things because of what was missing.

As we went to build these, the tech/product debt that we had built up during our experimental phase really started to become apparent. We were missing common and expected things like user-defined types (maybe not important for dynamic langs, but we're a statically typed functional language, so being able to create types is kinda important), configurable (or at least changable) HTTP middleware, and a few other things.

The reason for the rewrite is that had been taking long detours around our tech stack for a while. Now that there's limited resources (as in, just me), the cost of taking the long way to everything we build is just a little too high, so it feels like a rewrite (note: just of the backend, the majority of the code is in the frontend and doesn't need to change!) is necessary to get to product/market fit.

I also hope it won't be the death of us. Fortunately, F# isn't a valid value for $hotlang! (Good thing I didn't pick Rust!)

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#34

Post by danjac »

rkangel wrote: post #32
danjac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Often times tech founders - especially if inexperienced - let the freedom and power of a complete greenfield project with no management oversight go to their heads. They've always wanted to build something in $cool_tech and now nothing stands in their way. That becomes the goal in itself, the business and getting customers and money being a far second. Their desires could be far more cheaply satiated with a side…

There's an alternative presentation of the same facts: Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology. My actual beliefs…

Productivity is relative. A tech stack that might give you some easy early gains might fail you at 3 a.m. when the site's down and you have no idea how to fix it. Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework, and now hackers have all your customer data (see for example Parler). Recruitment in tech X is much harder because there's nobody around with decent experience in it.

These are all problems that you really don't want when your focus needs to be on the business. By all means adopt new tech where there is a real business need, and by all means avoid obsolete tech where you can, but be wary of the siren call of the cool tech stack when you're starting a new company.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#35

Post by rkangel »

danjac wrote: post #34
rkangel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an alternative presentation of the same facts: Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology. My actual beliefs…

Productivity is relative. A tech stack that might give you some easy early gains might fail you at 3 a.m. when the site's down and you have no idea how to fix it. Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework, and now hackers have all your customer data (see for example Parler). Recruitment in tech X is much harder because there's nobody ar…

My point with Erlang though is that there are several mature and sensible tech choices that Big Enterprise (TM) can make it difficult to use.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#36

Post by draw_down »

danjac wrote: post #31
draw_down wrote: post #9

We used “boring technology” (the stuff we happen to like) and our startup still failed.

Startups fail for a number of reasons. Success depends on removing as many of those reasons as possible. One of those reasons is building on an esoteric tech stack that, while perhaps interesting to the developers, consumes time, energy and money better spent on things like customer acquisition and retention. However even if you eliminate that one reason, there are still many other reasons that will kill your startup…

If you say so. I'm not really interested in startups, I just think people are kidding themselves about what is shiney stuff for addlebrained idiots and what is boring technology that serious people use to do serious business things.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#37

Post by MarbleEmperor »

tomhoward wrote: post #30
mmaunder wrote: post #22

I wonder how many HN readers don’t realize this is satire. It’s unfortunate that they used the word customer once in the post. Total omission would have been so perfect. The point of the satire is devs navel gazing rather than focusing obsessively on who their customer is and their customers needs and solving that customers problems. There is a failure mode that has a dev team obsessing over building abstraction laye…

But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned. It doesn't seem to be satirising somet…

Well this seems like much more of an internal thing that would really never make it to any sort of media publication. You never read about the internal shit-flinging that happens when a team of engineers has to decide on a stack, but it does certainly happen. At the very least I have personal anecdotal experience of this happening from a couple of companies I worked at.

I can't think of a specific example, but when BLOCKCHAIN was the new kid on the block, every startup and it's mother just threw that word into their company somewhere somehow. How many of them got very far?

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#38

Post by karmakaze »

WJW wrote: post #6

I think I spotted the error they made. There is no mention of machine learning at all!

Ouch. I worked at a startup that pivoted and updated our tech stack along the way. There was some foray into machine learning but not too heavily. This might actually describe more than one of the startups I've worked at.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#39

Post by pkolaczk »

danjac wrote: post #34
rkangel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an alternative presentation of the same facts: Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology. My actual beliefs…

Productivity is relative. A tech stack that might give you some easy early gains might fail you at 3 a.m. when the site's down and you have no idea how to fix it. Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework, and now hackers have all your customer data (see for example Parler). Recruitment in tech X is much harder because there's nobody ar…

> Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework

On the flip side, stable and vetted popular frameworks also have security problems; and although these problems may be less likely, they are more bad people trying to break them, because when they do, the win is really big. E.g. Windows vs Linux viruses / trojans - I'm not sure if Linux is so much more secure to justify the difference.

Also new tech stacks typically evolve faster and are quicker to fix bugs. It is much faster to fix a problem in a young, less complex product, without having to deal with things like technical debt, backwards compatibility with millions of apps or endless discussions between committers about how it should be fixed.

Re: We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

#40

Post by ericjang »

tomhoward wrote: post #30
mmaunder wrote: post #22

I wonder how many HN readers don’t realize this is satire. It’s unfortunate that they used the word customer once in the post. Total omission would have been so perfect. The point of the satire is devs navel gazing rather than focusing obsessively on who their customer is and their customers needs and solving that customers problems. There is a failure mode that has a dev team obsessing over building abstraction laye…

But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned. It doesn't seem to be satirising somet…

This happens all the time at Google, though the mundane details of internal tech churn are not often publicized. Source: am Google employee.
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