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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

dylanhuang.com

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#81

Post by foxglacier »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #53
cj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. I’ve successfully done exactly this. Except in order to get there, we had to spend 3-4 years selling cheap $29/mo self-serve plans at volume to iron out all of the kinks in the product and UX. Only after that were we able to go upmarket selling $40-90k/yr con…

Yeah exactly. You can't just roll out of bed one morning and grustle out a stable enterprise application. Also: > customers paying $20k/yr or more have extremely high expectations across the board. They definitely do, in certain ways. But also a lot of the software companies use sucks shit. But this part of the other comment cracked me up. > a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software This i…

Yes, get industry experience! You have to be pretty special to be just a software developer with no domain knowledge who can somehow make something more valuable than the bazillion other just-a-software-developers out there. I sell fairly high priced software to companies and I'm doing fine. Though I'm kind of lucky in how I got into it and by now most of my domain knowledge has come from my previous customers asking for things.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#82

Post by x0x0 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #73
x0x0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most of what early vc practically pays for is salaries (and a lot of that is really just a passthrough to landlords because California is an incompetent state run by incompetent people.)

I believe you just had a "whoosh" moment.

That's what I get for reading literally. sigh.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#84

Post by anonzzzies »

notforviewingit wrote: post #65
gortok wrote: post #25

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us beli…

Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well. This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales…

'Just' making money is not very hard in IT. We have been for decades and it's only growing; we do emergency software fixes which means we can ask whatever. We do not, we have a high hourly rate but it is usually clear what it will cost. We don't grow because I do not want a big company and good people are almost impossible to find, but there are way too many projects as, and I know HN doesn't believe this in a survivor bias kind of way, software is getting worse very fast (thanks node and python; and we used to laugh at php; that's more or less a joy these days) so our regular clients are calling more often year after year and new clients come in at a rate I don't care for. But the dream still is products, not consulting; I sold my first product company 25 years ago; I shouldn't have. Nice money but I want it back; consulting is nice and we make a lot for the past 25 years, but making products is nicer so we are now doing 50/50 products vs consulting and hoping it will work. We don't have to work for decades already but why not if it's fun?

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#85

Post by Jarwain »

spullara wrote: post #74
Jarwain wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my understanding of "big company" salaries are skewed but I imagine there's a profitable middle ground between big company salary and hypergrowth? As long as one isn't taking VC money at least On the flip side, I can't say I'm super sure what "hypergrowth" means, it's a rate of growth but I guess what really Matters is some expected valuation/market cap kinda thing

pretty hard beating riskless 500k+ TC without having equity in a hypergrowth company.

Isn't 500k+ TC on the upper upper end of the salary distribution though? Vs equity in a rapid growth 20% CAGR or somethin? Or hypergrowth that caps out around 2M ARR?

I guess I'm just trying to gain some career perspective on this heavily bootstrapped startup I'm at thats targeting the alt-thread-mentioned "medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people." and whether it's really worth it for me

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#88

Post by rat87 »

williamstein wrote: post #5

> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

There's a huge number of them https://openapi.tools/#sdk

Including the semi official tools https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator

Now if you want multi language generation and especially high quality you may have to spend a lot of time evaluating different choices. I decided that the official java client didn't generate very nice python code and went with https://github.com/openapi-generators/openapi-python-client even though it's a small personal project with a primary developer+random contributions from users. It just seemed nicer to use for python. Finding which generator to use especially for JavaScript seems difficult

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#89

Post by rat87 »

xnx wrote: post #12
williamstein wrote: post #5

> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator has 22K stars

That's the official tool and has support for a lot of languages(probably the most). Granted last time I checked the generated python code wasn't great. Can't speak for other languages

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#90

Post by insensible »

jonny_eh wrote: post #32
codingdave wrote: post #4

This is not the first story I've heard of a product that isn't quite right, but when deciding where to pivot, fell into AI as the answer and then failed. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - when we figure out what AI is good at and what it is not, we will start treating it as a tool instead of a goal, and our product ideation will stabilize.

> when we figure out what AI is good at and what it is not We know. It's good at making stuff up. It's bad at facts or for generating things that withstand scrutiny.

What we don’t understand yet is what that means. We have never had such a thing before and it’s not clear what the patterns are that will make the best use of its known attributes with the least exposure to downsides — whether those be related to the tools, the end users, or the business stakeholders, or any other parties. Volumes more nuance to understand, and we’re just getting started.
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