81–90 of 141 posts
One 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.
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Can you name, say, three notable software businesses whose advantage was hard-to-replicate tech?
Yes. Any tech acquisition over 1B is never done for customers. For example deep mind from google. Just this week Intel bought Havana labs for 2B due to their AI chip hardware. Also, look at what AMD is doing to Intel. This is pure tech play (and pure moat). The underlying rule in play, is that the tech business is bound to "leapfrogging", I.e. a better technology can destroy companies almost overnight (see the case o…
As for billion dollar acquisitions.... Visio, GitHub, Yammer, LinkedIn, Instagram, Parse, etc.... shit-tons of them are done for market reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Any tech acquisition over 1B is never done for customers. For example deep mind from google. Just this week Intel bought Havana labs for 2B due to their AI chip hardware. Also, look at what AMD is doing to Intel. This is pure tech play (and pure moat). The underlying rule in play, is that the tech business is bound to "leapfrogging", I.e. a better technology can destroy companies almost overnight (see the case o…
I said software business, so I'm not sure why you're bringing up AMD or Intel. As for billion dollar acquisitions.... Visio, GitHub, Yammer, LinkedIn, Instagram, Parse, etc.... shit-tons of them are done for market reasons.
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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.
Google is pretty true, though.
The 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…
On the upside, my last failed SaaS product was at least partly responsible in landing me my current job. At the time of my interview I had not yet fully given up on it. I mentioned it (the failing SaaS) because I had learned a few relevant technologies while building it.
One of the engineers interviewing me pulled it up on his laptop and said, "Show it to us." So most of the interview turned into a combination demo/technical discussion of the project. They ended up skipping the whiteboard/coding portion of the interview (which is good because I suck at those), and I ended up with a (very good) job offer. The job itself has turned out pretty good so far, too.
So, I've got that going for me, which is nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Any tech acquisition over 1B is never done for customers. For example deep mind from google. Just this week Intel bought Havana labs for 2B due to their AI chip hardware. Also, look at what AMD is doing to Intel. This is pure tech play (and pure moat). The underlying rule in play, is that the tech business is bound to "leapfrogging", I.e. a better technology can destroy companies almost overnight (see the case o…
I said software business, so I'm not sure why you're bringing up AMD or Intel. As for billion dollar acquisitions.... Visio, GitHub, Yammer, LinkedIn, Instagram, Parse, etc.... shit-tons of them are done for market reasons.
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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.…
And then, every 4 to 8 months you'll spend some 2 hours making sure everything is working right and up to date. If you get into another user-base class (like, from 100 to 1000, or from 1000 to 10000), you will spend all those 3 days again.
Compare that with cloud services, where you'll spend a week up-front, and 2 days at random when something changes. But well, that comes with the bonus of a much higher price and a slower development speed.
There is the safety to know that you can move between user-base classes without any cost. You'll just be taken by surprise when it actually happens and you discover that those 3 days are a rounding error compared to what it costs to update your software.
> I didn’t help my customers and was too focused on the technology. Somewhat ironic that your Postmortem is highly focused on technology as well :) But seriously, SaaS businesses are still businesses. I think so many software developers think “I can build that!” about X and fail to realize how much of a business has nothing to do with the product.
Given how often it is said that "build it and they will come" is an untrue trope, you would expect people instinctively know to avoid spending too much time on the build it part. I however am guilty of this myself so I can't really blame the author and think most just tend to get lost in the implementation phase because it's far too comfortable.
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Heroku does that in 3 minutes. And maintains & updates that stack for you. And gives you deployment automation etc. For $7 a month.
Exactly. Deployment is merely a "git push" away. It is amazing how simple it is to get started building a new product. Every second you spend configuring web servers and stuff is a second you should be spending adding value to your business.
Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea.
You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost.
Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see the reason why pretty clearly, unlike in cloud providers where inefficiencies can just suck up money until you notice.
And I definitely take exception to the "every _second_ you spend doing something other than business is a waste" because by that logic I shouldn't use the bathroom or take time to have a coffee.