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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

#81

Post by karmajunkie »

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.

this doesn’t track with my experience. every time i’ve posted an elixir job we had at least a couple dozen qualified, experienced candidates and a fairly diverse applicant pool.

you just have to post where they are. i strongly recommend the newsletters, the jobs channel on the elixir slack, and elixirforums. all great resources.

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

#82

Post by karmajunkie »

ken47 wrote: post #57
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…

I don't know if your post was a humble brag, but on Elixir + rewriting core code well, if I'm buying a software company and I know that the engineering team took their time to write good, maintainable code, that company is worth a lot more than if it the codebase is spaghetti quicksand.

lol no, it was not intended to be a humblebrag.

i’d love to say you were correct, and if it was a tech acquisition you might be right. in our case they were acquiring our customers and goodwill primarily. the app was sunset a year later.

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

#83

Post by karmajunkie »

dartos wrote: post #8
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…

Rebuilding an existing codebase in any other language would fit that argument as well.

yep, you’re absolutely correct on this point. there were technical reasons why i undertook the effort and why i chose elixir, but the truth is that the correct business decision would have been to keep going on our original stack.

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

#84

Post by karmajunkie »

pier25 wrote: post #21
tomtheelder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the original language of the codebase

Thanks I was distracted and didn't get that

yeah in this case it was a ruby/rails/react/angular frankenapp that was very much guided by a big ball of mud pattern.

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

#85

Post by karmajunkie »

pdimitar wrote: post #37
farhanhubble wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's micro-shortsightedness. Lots of tools even OS utilities are being rewritten in a "better" language. It could be quite beneficial from a business perspective too if you're spending more time fixing issues than addressing new requirements.

That really depends though. Part of the time you are right but there are legitimate businesses settings where not shipping by the end of next week can mean missing out on much-needed $50K or so revenue.

my market was exactly this; tied to the start of the semester, if i missed shipping a feature my next shot at getting it used in production was months away. and basically if we missed the fall season it might as well have not even happened.

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

#86

Post by yellowapple »

y04nn wrote: post #23
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…

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…

> 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 startup.

This was the exact issue we encountered after I had switched a startup's backend from Node to Elixir. I was able to churn out features pretty quickly (and the switch itself turned the core batch job underlying the product from a multi-hour runtime to less than a minute), but the bus factor was pretty much 1 and we were never able to really increase that before the company ended up running out of runway and folding.

This was almost a decade ago, though, so things have hopefully improved somewhat.

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

#87

Post by karmajunkie »

ericb wrote: post #43
gregors wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yeah, elixir is still going to destroy it at runtime. the concurrent story is even more important with the features you’re talking about and especially in that segment, it’s not even close.

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

#88

Post by voidfunc »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #78
voidfunc wrote: post #74

Meh, if you're not building your b2b SaaS company on one of the big names (python, Java, ruby, go, javascript) in 2024 you're just deeply unserious about running a company. The language is the last of your problems.

How did you miss PHP?

Just forgot about it... Big 6!

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

#89

Post by stanmancan »

pier25 wrote: post #19
stanmancan wrote: post #2

I moved from PHP/Laravel to Elixir/Phoenix about two years ago and I can't imagine using anything else these days.

How does LiveView compare to LiveWire?

Live View is SO much better it’s not even close. It’s faster, more reliable, easier to use, way less weird gotchas.

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

#90

Post by dudul »

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…

It has nothing to do with elixir and everything to do with you spending time on a rewrite instead of adding new stuff.
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