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> user engagement is direct correlated to value IMO It is not. At RethinkDB we had great user engagement, but people were unwilling to pay (or unwilling to pay

> user engagement is direct correlated to value IMO It is not. At RethinkDB we had great user engagement, but people were unwilling to pay (or unwilling to pay enough to keep the business going). The heuristic of getting money in early avoids markets with bad fundamentals (developer tools is one instance of such markets).

kurttheviking 10y ago
Do you think the one-month horizon applies to enterprise products as well? If not, how does the metric change? In some industries a sales cycle lasts 18 months before culminating in a multi-million ARR contract. I'm curious given your experience with a database product that perhaps could have gone down that path.
- coffeemug 10y ago
  This post mostly applies to hunting deers and rabbits[1]. Elephants and flies are different. The concern with new founders working on enterprise products is that it's very easy to convince yourself you're building for the enterprise when you really aren't. RethinkDB is case in point -- it's not the type of product you sell to a CIO (even with MongoDB, very few if any large organizations run on it -- it's mostly limited to silos). We found that we could capture at most $100k in value annually, and $1m contracts were ten years away. My advice would be to either (a) not start enterprise companies unless you really know what you're doing, (b) start enterprise companies with consumer adoption models (Slack), or (c) if you must start an enterprise company, get really spectacular advisors who regularly spend enough time with you to understand your business intimately, and then listen to them. [1] http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build...
yoshyosh 10y ago
Building a DB is a large endeavor, it's hard to see being able to get people to buy within only a month of contact for it (without playing with it and such). If you were to start from scratch again with RethinkDB, do you feel this logic still applies?
- coffeemug 10y ago
  I would build it as a PaaS business (e.g. see Firebase), although that's a bad business for other reasons (impossible to effectively compete with Google Cloud and AWS).
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Why not rent out access to AWS / GC instances running your software?

kurttheviking 10y ago

Do you think the one-month horizon applies to enterprise products as well? If not, how does the metric change? In some industries a sales cycle lasts 18 months before culminating in a multi-million ARR contract. I'm curious given your experience with a database product that perhaps could have gone down that path.

coffeemug 10y ago
This post mostly applies to hunting deers and rabbits[1]. Elephants and flies are different. The concern with new founders working on enterprise products is that it's very easy to convince yourself you're building for the enterprise when you really aren't. RethinkDB is case in point -- it's not the type of product you sell to a CIO (even with MongoDB, very few if any large organizations run on it -- it's mostly limited to silos). We found that we could capture at most $100k in value annually, and $1m contracts were ten years away. My advice would be to either (a) not start enterprise companies unless you really know what you're doing, (b) start enterprise companies with consumer adoption models (Slack), or (c) if you must start an enterprise company, get really spectacular advisors who regularly spend enough time with you to understand your business intimately, and then listen to them. [1] http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build...

yoshyosh 10y ago

Building a DB is a large endeavor, it's hard to see being able to get people to buy within only a month of contact for it (without playing with it and such). If you were to start from scratch again with RethinkDB, do you feel this logic still applies?

coffeemug 10y ago
I would build it as a PaaS business (e.g. see Firebase), although that's a bad business for other reasons (impossible to effectively compete with Google Cloud and AWS).
- nine_k 10y ago
  Why not rent out access to AWS / GC instances running your software?