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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#61

Post by baxtr »

talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it.

First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins.

Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkiller.

Third, I believe almost no product is a real painkiller. We in the West at least live in sheer abundance. Almost none of our problems is really painful. For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly. Was the iPhone a painkiller? Not until you considered using it.

I’m not saying the analogy is useless. But I don’t think that vitamins can’t be super successful.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#63

Post by skc »

He bravely and openly battled through alot of skepticism. Unfortunately (or fortunately I suppose), it turns out the skeptics were right.

Always seemed like a very, very niche product .

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#64

Post by morelisp »

landonxjames wrote: post #47

According to the final tweet in that thread [0] it seems like they are pivoting to a sort of AI generated art based social media platform. I’m curious why they think this has the potential to be a “mass market changing” business since the social media world seems pretty over saturated already [0] https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713

The last thing he already knew how to build didn't work, so he's going to try something else he already knows how to build.

PMF? What's that?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#65

Post by whatever1 »

robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

Microsoft’s code editor killed everything in the market by using this client-server approach.

It is so seamless that you forget that the code is not in your machine.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#66

Post by MarkSweep »

obblekk wrote: post #57

Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path. That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for. A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS beco…

As evidence of a market for this, see the company Citrix. Also I think Facebook's content moderation website is only accessible from some sort of remote desktop system.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#67

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance.

I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't.

If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, or the fact that some page is loading 300 ad-tracking scripts and one of them is accidentally blocking. The only time I really notice client-side execution performance is when someone posts a cool 3D browser example on HN and things slightly slow down a bit on my phone when there are a couple million polygons or whatever. Even then, things are fine on my laptop.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#68

Post by miketery »

I’d love to see a mighty type app but for a phone emulator.

I’m tired of all these apps constantly doing stuff in the background and tracking my location anytime I use them.

If I had a “mighty” phone app, and could stream an emulated device with the apps on that server I’d happily pay $5~$10/ month.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#69

Post by robenkleene »

danpalmer wrote: post #58
robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

> But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. Media creation maybe, but I feel like professional software engineering might move soon. At the beginning of the year I moved from a company where I worked entirely locally, running a local stack, developing in a local editor, etc, to a…

I agree overall, but I don't think it'll be VS Code in the browser, I think VS Code's remote features with the client-server model (client: VS Code's UI running locally, and server: the code executing and file-system running on the server).

I've also tried VS Code in the browser, and personally I find it an absolute unusable mess, the key binding space is just way to overloaded for a complex app like VS Code, and the browser itself to co-exist (e.g., many of VS Code's important bindings get eaten by the browser itself). I think that all that really matters is that the UI for complex apps runs locally.

(But I could be wrong here, I don't make the mistake of extrapolating my own experiences to other users. E.g., I also find VS Code to be so slow I avoid, but most users couldn't care less. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27360494)

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#70

Post by talhof8 »

baxtr wrote: post #61
talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

Vitamins can def be super successful, as you mentioned. Agreed.

I think that with Mighty it's just the combination of being an expensive product (mainly to operate, but to some extent for the end customer as well) + privacy concerns + most people don't suffer that much from slow browsers and instead willing to pay $20/30 a month to solve it.

Pretty niche market, I think. But might be mistaken...

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