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Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

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Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#41

Post by hansonkd »

mbesto wrote: post #28
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.

The reply's asking if you need 100 devs, might not realize this article was about building SaaS apps.

Having worked at multiple unicorn+ SaaS products, the product feature demands are significant.

Yes if you have one sole feature that you can pour all your engineering resources into like whatsapp delivering messages then it makes sense you might get away with 2 Elixir devs.

If you are working at a unicorn who just raised $250m in founding and now has to deliver 100 new features this year... well the elegance of the language won't help as much as you think.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#42

Post by pdimitar »

hansonkd wrote: post #32

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post. As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things: 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smar…

I am probably getting annoying as this is my 3rd such post in this thread but... have you posted a job ad in ElixirForum?

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#43

Post by ericb »

gregors wrote: post #17
stanislavb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have experience with Ruby on Rails? I've built apps both with Elixir/Phoenix and with Rails. Yes, the Elixir/Phoenix stack is amazing and is definitely superior over Rails in several ways; however, with regards to Bootstrapping and releasing a real-world app/business (web based), Rails is still the king.

I've got in-depth experience with many Rails apps and quite a few Phoenix apps (and many other stacks). I used to agree with your opinion, though I think Rails no longer holds a massive edge. Phoenix is now just as effective at releasing real-world products especially run-of-the-mill web apps. And when things get complex after a bit of time (usually due to business logic evolving) - much more effective. The place whe…

> On the other hand Phoenix destroys Rails in any realtime scenario.

The Rails realtime story is going to be radically improved in Rails 8! I've been using the Turbo beta, and it is magical.

With 3 lines of code each, I made my index page, and show page live, and real-time updating.

I think Phoenix has something similar--perhaps it was the inspiration?

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#45

Post by gregors »

selcuka wrote: post #40
gregors wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when they rewrote their app and blogged about it? I do! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/11/our-net-strategy/

It was a (slow) migration, though, not a rewrite from scratch. They kept shipping software.

Exactly my point. The way the vast majority of rewrites happen.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#46

Post by cancan »

bnchrch wrote: post #13

Disclaimer: Elixir is extremely productive, Phoenix is outstanding, the community is world-class, and as a result of the Erlang VM / OTP / Beam you can remove whole parts of your traditional webstack. If you haven't tried it I cannot recommend it enough. But! As a long-time Elixir Developer who has gladly used it to bootstrap many applications and companies, I have to say I think this article is actively harmful to t…

I can't speak for Tyler (the author) but as someone who's worked with him and managed him for over 2 years, I'd say take Tyler at his word versus assigning malice to his writing.

He's a powerhouse of a developer, loves, LOVES the ecosystem and has always wanted to give back as much as he could. He's submitted patches to the core, he did so much for our Elixir CI and felt bad not giving it back via open-sourcing it and then blogging on our platform.

Tyler was instrumental in many of our technical decisions at our company, and I can confidently say nothing he made us buy was unnecessary, and he often worked very hard to save us the smallest bit of money.

Just my 2 cents!

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#47

Post by [deleted] »

karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

[deleted]

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#48

Post by sb8244 »

pdimitar wrote: post #34
y04nn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was true 6 years ago, but I'm currently playing with Elixir/Phoenix and I feel very productive, Phoenix is well design and adding new functionalities is not that hard and the code is easy to debug. On the other side, Elixir and Erlang are not that popular and every time I talk about it to other developers, they may have heard of it but can't talk about it, so it's probably not that easy to find devs for a st…

(EDIT: To clarify, my comment is only a response to "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup") --- I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting…

Did the parent comment get updated? It doesn't track to what you've put here.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#49

Post by pdimitar »

sb8244 wrote: post #48
pdimitar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(EDIT: To clarify, my comment is only a response to "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup") --- I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting…

Did the parent comment get updated? It doesn't track to what you've put here.

No it hasn't. As I stated, I was only reacting to his "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup" is all.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#50

Post by gregors »

hansonkd wrote: post #32

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post. As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things: 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smar…

I remember interviewing at a place that hired close to 90 elixir engineers in 2 months (or so they said). That actually sounded like nightmare fuel to me (in any language) so I didn't pursue it further.
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