I've been doing firmware for the better part of a decade and I used to do PHP MVC web stuff before that for a megacorp. They used Yii which had ActiveRecord. You could have it scan your entire db and generate all the models including relations, then abstract from those models for the business logic. Any db changes... just re-run the generation. I can make a complex 15 table database and all the models in a few hours and jump right into productivity. Seems weird people are still going through problems with this today.
A Failed SaaS Postmortem
61–70 of 141 posts
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#62I'll go out and say it. Most Indie SaaS developers don't really really want to start a business. They might want it consciously and convince themselves of this fact, but sub consciously they are making the wrong choices, optimizing the wrong things, digging their own grave. The moment things like customers, prices, marketing, money, taxes, lawyers, incorporation, accountants, employees — all SUPER normal things in an…
I was guilty of this. Spent far too much time optimizing database indexes and far too little time actually talking with customers and validating new ideas.
Technology choice is the least important part of a startup. Pick what you know and roll with it. Make sure the first developers you hire "get" startups and aren't in it to tinker with their pet projects or push some bozo agenda (eg: don't use js frameworks because.... they are "bloat". don't use third party libraries because they are "security risks". don't use the cloud because RMS said not to). Developers with strong "unorthodox" opinions about technology are toxic to startups.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#63One of the craziest parts of this article to me is the sheer number of technologies he picked right off the bat to implement the service. Datadog? Digital Ocean? Wal-e? If he had gone with a cloud provider like AWS he probably could have cut that list by 2/3 by just using built in solutions.
For a startup, something like heroku is perfect. Course, my opinion is formed based on data 5 years out of date. Now days I'm sure there is something that abstracts things even more.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#64The main point here seems to be that the failure to build a SaaS product is blamed in part on the compounding technical debt incurred due to a fast-moving software ecosystem and the effort involved in keeping up. The point I think most people should consider instead, is that building an app is not the same thing as building a business. Building the app is comparably easy, once you've proven that you understand the ma…
> The app, it turns out, is the easy part.
Automating existing Excel spreadsheets is much easier for solution creation success than automating what you perceive to be a business workflow.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#65One of the craziest parts of this article to me is the sheer number of technologies he picked right off the bat to implement the service. Datadog? Digital Ocean? Wal-e? If he had gone with a cloud provider like AWS he probably could have cut that list by 2/3 by just using built in solutions.
Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout, slap an email address on the page and there's your logging and error system. AWS is massively overcomplicated for an indie SaaS business, and it costs way, way too much. You can have a box with plenty of room for $5 - $10 / month and it takes about 25 seconds to launch it. I had 20k concurrent users with a $5 server and Cloudflare. Other people ar…
> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout
So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc?
Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head. A head that needs to be thinking about everything but how to configure apache or the load balancer or postgresql.
> keep it simple and boring
Installing a web server from a package manager and configuring it in a repeatable way is not simple and boring. A single person startup doesn't have the bandwidth to do that.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#66[deleted]
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must have a small development team that turns over infrequently. The purpose of cultivating development ecosystems is to attract developers, and quickly. We migrated to Angular 6 and were able to hire 5 front end developers and get them productive in 2 months.
You're not wrong about the size of the dev team and turnover. At the same time, I'm not sure if taking 2 months to get productive is a win? Wasn't one of the angular "upgrades" a total rewrite? What is the overhead of maintaining a second tightly coupled front-end app. I found doubling the surface area seemed to square the effort, not double it. How much of that productivity is illusory and could be done with fewer p…
I work for an enterprise company with more than 70,000 employees. Standing up a team and getting them productive in 2 months is basically unheard of at this level.
This community is heavily biased to small companies, startups, and students. I'd be hesitant to judge their approval as affirmations that you are doing the "right thing".
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#68We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…
Stimulus Reflex is probably what you want.
https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex
Lightweight, real-time updates using the same Rails views already built.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#69I'll go out and say it. Most Indie SaaS developers don't really really want to start a business. They might want it consciously and convince themselves of this fact, but sub consciously they are making the wrong choices, optimizing the wrong things, digging their own grave. The moment things like customers, prices, marketing, money, taxes, lawyers, incorporation, accountants, employees — all SUPER normal things in an…
I was guilty of this. Spent far too much time optimizing database indexes and far too little time actually talking with customers and validating new ideas. Technology choice is the least important part of a startup. Pick what you know and roll with it. Make sure the first developers you hire "get" startups and aren't in it to tinker with their pet projects or push some bozo agenda (eg: don't use js frameworks because…
The "bozo agenda" is a great point about early tech hires. I bumped into a few over the years and they can totally kill your dev team and young business.
Re: A Failed SaaS Postmortem
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard to develop tech is a huge moat. The issue here is timing. Hard tech buys you time. Most of the M&A today is not done due to hard to replicate, but due to time. Even if I can replicate the tech, I do not have time to do that.
Can you name, say, three notable software businesses whose advantage was hard-to-replicate tech?
Google (search), Microsoft (OS, especially early on), Dreamworks (rendering, animation), Oracle (database, early on before OSS database got good).
It's the exception, not the rule though.