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We Rewrote Everything in Rust, and Our Startup Still Failed
- colesantiago 6y agosatire is missing from the title.
- colmvp 6y agoI mean if you need a satire tag to realize this is satire, I don't know what to say.
- cmpb 6y agoI'm just saying, it took me until halfway down page two to realize it.
- blast_hardchese 6y agoThat's nothing, I still don't know it's satire.
- Danieru 6y agoIt was real to me until the last paragraph. Everything else read real in the style of a repentant founder.
- sidpatil 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- tyingq 6y ago"Due to heavy traffic in this file, we are loading a read-only version" Does that mean it was shared read-write?
- redleggedfrog 6y agoIf only it were satire...
- lukehutch 6y agoPretty sure it's 100% satire, but that doesn't mean it's not the story of 80% of startups.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arnon 6y ago"Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in Haskell instead." Salty...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 6y agoI realize this is a joke, but regardless these days you basically need to spend ~25% of each year rewriting your app just to stay in security compliance.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoIf that's true, you should think about your architecture. It shouldn't require that level of effort.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 6y agoIt's less an issue of our code, and more an issue of third-party APIs from our partners getting deprecated. And Angularjs, where upgrading to angular or rewriting in react doesn't really do anything for end users, but if we want to keep showing up in search results then the writing is on the wall.
- jollofricepeas 6y agoShould of rewrote in Clojure.
- oldcopernicus 6y agoEveryone knows that successful startups uses only Java or PHP
- joosters 6y ago'...Our incredible journey...' I hope they were thinking of https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ when they wrote this!
- codeulike 6y agoPublishing this on Google Docs is so passe, clearly should be on Substack or Ghost
- alangibson 6y agoIt'd be way more popular is it was self hosted on Netlify using a static site generator
- falcolas 6y agoHaven't you heard? The pendulum is swinging back, and Wordpress is all the rage again.
- alangibson 6y ago> We pushed back the launch for two months to tweak our build system to perfection That line got me
- coldcode 6y agoGreat satire. But I have seen teams of incredible engineers doing amazing things perfectly and still go out of business because its not how amazing your engineering is, it's how amazing your product or service is to people who are willing to pay (or someone is willing to pay you).
- alangibson 6y ago"People don't want drills, they want holes" - Guy that started a drill company who's name I forget
- dariusj18 6y agoA businessman sells you the hole, marketing sells you the drill.
- nickelcitymario 6y agoCan't tell if you're joking, but I think this is backwards?
- dariusj18 6y agoI don't think it's backwards, though the term businessman might be swapped for something better.
- nickelcitymario 6y agoI'm 99% sure the whole drill bit vs. holes analogy was created by a marketer. I could very well be wrong, but I've read it in countless marketing and copywriting books. It's basically selling the benefit instead of the feature, which is what any half-decent marketer brings to the table. That's basically my simple idea of at least half of what I do as a marketer. I'm curious though, and I don't mean this in a confrontational way at all. Why do you think marketers sell the bit vs the hole?
- 6y ago
- martingxx 6y agoEverything about this screams satire, except it just doesn't have the typical humour element (to me at least), so I'm not even sure now.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoOne way to know: it lacks any real specifics like company name, any hint of what the product is, investment details, etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonp888 6y agoI can't believe they didn't use Kubernetes for deployment. What a bunch of amateurs - no wonder their product failed.
- ibraheemdev 6y agoThey say that their product failed and they didn't even use Julia? They really had no idea what they were doing.
- thojest 6y agoBrilliant write up! Made me laugh a lot, especially the end with Haskell :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- marcinzm 6y ago>Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in Haskell instead. So close yet so far. Given the funding you need to rewrite your app in BOTH Haskell and Rust. Then depending on which one is in favor at launch time you go with that and never mention the other one. Then you look like a prophetic genius company no matter which way the market turns.
- joosters 6y agoProduct idea: A program that makes your web app masquerade as any language that you choose! It rewrites and hides your .php extensions, and replaces error pages to make them look appropriate for the chosen technology stack. All the actual js is obfuscated & compiled to WASM to hide the shameful use of jquery/react/angular/vue/whatever is no longer the 'in' tool. You can switch technologies with the push of a button!
- rainingcatndogs 6y agoA "tech stack spoofer", that would be cool and it can have applications beyond that like for security by obscurity.
- echelon 6y agoI get that this is satire, but leave Rust out of it. Rust is blameless when it comes to bad business ideas and execution. You shouldn't be scaring people away from a language that offers so much. Rust is not hard like all the dumb memes make it out to be. For startups where performance is vital (media, streaming), I'd argue it'll be indispensable [1]. The Rust bullying harms our community. We don't have the corporate backing of Go. Pick on something from Google or Apple instead. [1] I wrote my media-intensive webapp, https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, in Rust and I'm quite productive.
- alangibson 6y agoRelax. Everyone gets that this isn't about Rust, and that it's about focusing on technology for its own sake.
- tyingq 6y agoIt's just a popular target, as in "Rust Evangelism Strikeforce". Typically, it's a good sign when people start poking fun.
- tyingq 6y agoOh, also, I liked this: https://imgur.com/noUdCET https://imgur.com/noUdCET
- kissgyorgy 6y agoThis is the best part: "We rewrote our microservices from Node to Go to C++ and then back to Node."
- gvb 6y agoincluding the next sentence "On every step, we saw 20% performance improvements."
- oopsiforgot7 6y agoIf we take this satire more seriously then it's meant, which was the biggest mistake? Lack of market research right? They should at the very least have done it post launch. Maybe more pre launch too? I think many of the other ones might have been survivable?
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoIt turns out that the startup was a hemp farm. The founders never communicated the vision with the developers and just let them run loose to see what they'd do.
- newsbinator 6y ago> The team brainstormed ideas for what we would like to build, and set to work. This deserves its own chapter.
- fouc 6y agomirror at https://outline.com/yr7ZBS https://outline.com/yr7ZBS
- noxer 6y agoLink goes to a google docs login page. No wonder they failed^^