5 ms·

We Rewrote Everything in $hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed

78 points by martinaglv 6y ago

villgax 6y ago
Reads like a joke with no explanation for needing a rewrite in the first place. The product itself was not used, dunno how folks assumed a rewrite would solve everything.
- hownottowrite 6y ago
  Narrator: It was actually a joke.
- xxs 6y ago
  >Reads like a joke Because it is. It's satire. Also posted yesterday with Rust and Haskell.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
WJW 6y ago
I think I spotted the error they made. There is no mention of machine learning at all!
- nablaone 6y ago
  and no blockchain
  - wojciii 6y ago
    I think that they hired people without checking that they could solve basic algorithmic problems on a whiteboard. This was clearly a fatal mistake.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Ouch. I worked at a startup that pivoted and updated our tech stack along the way. There was some foray into machine learning but not too heavily. This might actually describe more than one of the startups I've worked at.
danfrost 6y ago
I've found: - amazing business running on ball of mud code maintained in an insane way - the perfect architecture, CI/CD, TDD where the business/product has little/no value for the customer Also, I've seen the same stacks succeed and fail. The only common thing I can see is: - when the tech team fully understand the stack they're using - when the tech team fully understand the product and business they're building (and can make appropriate trade offs) There are a bunch of basic tech things. E.g. the underlying infrastructure has to be performance, scale, secure etc. There's also the issue of choosing a tech you can actually recruit for.
- the_duke 6y ago
  I have seen the same, but came away with a different conclusion. Shoddy architecture and even a bad product can be compensated by marketing, hype or a good sales team, while the most pristine architecture and codebase will not help you at all without any customers. We technologists often focus on the technical aspects, but in many domains they are the least important part for a startup.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    You are in the business of doing a thing, not having an aesthetically pleasing tech architecture. It is true that having a nice tech stack can make doing your thing easier, but it can also distract you from doing your thing well.
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      Very good summary. I was going to write a similar thing. Tech stack is important but (customer) money in the bank is importanter. Your daily reminder that FB started with PHP. Ship and sell first, the rest can be done later (yes your customer doesn't care that you rewrote your backend to use nanoservices in Go deployed to hundreds of lambda functions).
- austincheney 6y ago
  Facebook was originally a garbage PHP app.
madjam002 6y ago
Hiring engineers based on GitHub stars check, rewriting codebase despite little to no customers check, no mention of anything other than the tech stack check, yep this has to be satire!
draw_down 6y ago
We used “boring technology” (the stuff we happen to like) and our startup still failed.
- danjac 6y ago
  Startups fail for a number of reasons. Success depends on removing as many of those reasons as possible. One of those reasons is building on an esoteric tech stack that, while perhaps interesting to the developers, consumes time, energy and money better spent on things like customer acquisition and retention. However even if you eliminate that one reason, there are still many other reasons that will kill your startup.
  - draw_down 6y ago
    If you say so. I'm not really interested in startups, I just think people are kidding themselves about what is shiney stuff for addlebrained idiots and what is boring technology that serious people use to do serious business things.
codeulike 6y ago
This is just a parameterized version of the post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198571
- fouc 6y ago
  mirror of the old article at https://outline.com/yr7ZBS https://outline.com/yr7ZBS
- not_knuth 6y ago
  > Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file. The irony of that is, that simply posting a parameterized version gained a lot of traction as well, because the satire just hits home so well (the product is good).
jujodi 6y ago
Does this really happen?
- accurrent 6y ago
  Yes. Happened to a friend of mine who was doing an IoT startup. The github star metric is actually something the guy used. Unfortunately I don;t think it was his language choice that was the issue rather the github star thingy. Much of the problem is throwing a bunch of excellent engineers together without proper leadership will lead to severe under performance.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I’ve seen it happen.
- karmicthreat 6y ago
  Resume based development definitely happens.
- danjac 6y ago
  Yes. Often times tech founders - especially if inexperienced - let the freedom and power of a complete greenfield project with no management oversight go to their heads. They've always wanted to build something in $cool_tech and now nothing stands in their way. That becomes the goal in itself, the business and getting customers and money being a far second. Their desires could be far more cheaply satiated with a side project, but this way they don't have to use $boring_stack in their day job.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    There's an alternative presentation of the same facts: Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology. My actual beliefs are somewhere in between. I think the 'fast moving' world of javascript frameworks is a major contributor here as almost anything you chose in the last 5 years is obsolete. Not all tech stacks are predominantly web though. You might decide to build in Erlang/Elixir. You would be using something that's 30 years old, proven, not going out of fashion any time soon and the right tool for a lot of jobs. You'd be more productive in it than C++/Java, but that's what most enterprises would require.
justiceforsaas 6y ago
> We opened the floodgates. We shared the project on Twitter and Instagram, posted to HN and wrote a medium post. But, try as we might, no one was signing up. Later in the post: > Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in $ELITELANG instead. Our startup could have been a unicorn. Although this is satire, it's something a lot of funded startups do. They think they've solved user acquisition by getting investors money (hey, let's throw a couple thousands at Google/FB Ads, although there are 15+ viable acquisition channels we could try [1]), and spend time on building things in their own bubble. Also, the launch mention is pretty accurate: > We launched v2 of our product with a splash. Wonder if many startups would have better results if flipped the switch and treated product creation as a "launch" (a bunch of big sprints with a deadline) and user acquisition as something they do steadily, over a period of time. [1] https://zerotousers.substack.com/p/15-acquisition-channels-i-discovered https://zerotousers.substack.com/p/15-acquisition-channels-i...
sealthedeal 6y ago
hahaha HN Satire at its finest!
_wldu 6y ago
If they don't see the value, people won't even sign up for a free service. You have to build something that people actually want and need to use. That should be your first priority. Is there a real need? If there is, you'll get users no matter what language, platform or stack you are using. The constant technology change is just self comfort/pleasure and ultimately an expensive distraction. Look how busy we are. Look how cool our work is. In the end, no one cares about that. It's unfortunate that so many start ups continually have to relearn this basic truth.
mmaunder 6y ago
I wonder how many HN readers don’t realize this is satire. It’s unfortunate that they used the word customer once in the post. Total omission would have been so perfect. The point of the satire is devs navel gazing rather than focusing obsessively on who their customer is and their customers needs and solving that customers problems. There is a failure mode that has a dev team obsessing over building abstraction layers, tooling, automation etc and not writing a line of code that solves customer problems.
- tomhoward 6y ago
  But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned. It doesn't seem to be satirising something that actually needs to be satirised, as there is not a significant number of startups in the real world actually operating like this. A startup that operates like this wouldn't (barring a major mistake) get funding from YC or any other competent investor. The Silicon Valley sitcom is funny and successful because it satirises stuff that really does happen in the startup/tech/VC world (I know, I lived through much of it myself), but it noticeably doesn't stereotype founders as utterly clueless and hapless the way this piece does. With the sitcom, anyone who knows the startup world can point to real-world people/events on which the people/events in the sitcom are based. I don't think you can say that about this post. It's hard for me to believe the writer of this really knows any significant number of real-world startups.
  - MarbleEmperor 6y ago
    Well this seems like much more of an internal thing that would really never make it to any sort of media publication. You never read about the internal shit-flinging that happens when a team of engineers has to decide on a stack, but it does certainly happen. At the very least I have personal anecdotal experience of this happening from a couple of companies I worked at. I can't think of a specific example, but when BLOCKCHAIN was the new kid on the block, every startup and it's mother just threw that word into their company somewhere somehow. How many of them got very far?
lukevp 6y ago
Hope this isn’t what’s happening with dark[0]. Saw the early demos and I think the concept is killer, and don’t see why they would focus on a rewrite instead of building on what they have. I never even got asked to pay for it before they pivoted? It kinda felt like giving up and going back to building something instead of marketing and selling what they had. I say this with much respect for what they built, and someone who also tends toward focusing on the technical when things get hard. [0]: https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/ https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/
- pbiggar 6y ago
  Hey, thanks for the mention! Happy to explain my thinking here. Regarding marketing and selling what we have: we tried that and it's pretty clear we're missing important bits, in particular packages for common vendors (stripe, slack, etc), and a package for user management, as well as common things like validation. People love the concept (as do you, thanks!), but were struggling to build things because of what was missing. As we went to build these, the tech/product debt that we had built up during our experimental phase really started to become apparent. We were missing common and expected things like user-defined types (maybe not important for dynamic langs, but we're a statically typed functional language, so being able to create types is kinda important), configurable (or at least changable) HTTP middleware, and a few other things. The reason for the rewrite is that had been taking long detours around our tech stack for a while. Now that there's limited resources (as in, just me), the cost of taking the long way to everything we build is just a little too high, so it feels like a rewrite (note: just of the backend, the majority of the code is in the frontend and doesn't need to change!) is necessary to get to product/market fit. I also hope it won't be the death of us. Fortunately, F# isn't a valid value for $hotlang! (Good thing I didn't pick Rust!)

78 points by martinaglv 6y ago

Reads like a joke with no explanation for needing a rewrite in the first place. The product itself was not used, dunno how folks assumed a rewrite would solve everything.

hownottowrite 6y ago
Narrator: It was actually a joke.
xxs 6y ago
>Reads like a joke Because it is. It's satire. Also posted yesterday with Rust and Haskell.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

WJW 6y ago

I think I spotted the error they made. There is no mention of machine learning at all!

nablaone 6y ago
and no blockchain
- wojciii 6y ago
  I think that they hired people without checking that they could solve basic algorithmic problems on a whiteboard. This was clearly a fatal mistake.
karmakaze 6y ago
Ouch. I worked at a startup that pivoted and updated our tech stack along the way. There was some foray into machine learning but not too heavily. This might actually describe more than one of the startups I've worked at.

danfrost 6y ago

I've found: - amazing business running on ball of mud code maintained in an insane way - the perfect architecture, CI/CD, TDD where the business/product has little/no value for the customer Also, I've seen the same stacks succeed and fail. The only common thing I can see is: - when the tech team fully understand the stack they're using - when the tech team fully understand the product and business they're building (and can make appropriate trade offs) There are a bunch of basic tech things. E.g. the underlying infrastructure has to be performance, scale, secure etc. There's also the issue of choosing a tech you can actually recruit for.

the_duke 6y ago
I have seen the same, but came away with a different conclusion. Shoddy architecture and even a bad product can be compensated by marketing, hype or a good sales team, while the most pristine architecture and codebase will not help you at all without any customers. We technologists often focus on the technical aspects, but in many domains they are the least important part for a startup.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  You are in the business of doing a thing, not having an aesthetically pleasing tech architecture. It is true that having a nice tech stack can make doing your thing easier, but it can also distract you from doing your thing well.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Very good summary. I was going to write a similar thing. Tech stack is important but (customer) money in the bank is importanter. Your daily reminder that FB started with PHP. Ship and sell first, the rest can be done later (yes your customer doesn't care that you rewrote your backend to use nanoservices in Go deployed to hundreds of lambda functions).
austincheney 6y ago
Facebook was originally a garbage PHP app.

madjam002 6y ago

Hiring engineers based on GitHub stars check, rewriting codebase despite little to no customers check, no mention of anything other than the tech stack check, yep this has to be satire!

draw_down 6y ago

We used “boring technology” (the stuff we happen to like) and our startup still failed.

danjac 6y ago
Startups fail for a number of reasons. Success depends on removing as many of those reasons as possible. One of those reasons is building on an esoteric tech stack that, while perhaps interesting to the developers, consumes time, energy and money better spent on things like customer acquisition and retention. However even if you eliminate that one reason, there are still many other reasons that will kill your startup.
- draw_down 6y ago
  If you say so. I'm not really interested in startups, I just think people are kidding themselves about what is shiney stuff for addlebrained idiots and what is boring technology that serious people use to do serious business things.

codeulike 6y ago

This is just a parameterized version of the post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198571

fouc 6y ago
mirror of the old article at https://outline.com/yr7ZBS https://outline.com/yr7ZBS
not_knuth 6y ago
> Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file. The irony of that is, that simply posting a parameterized version gained a lot of traction as well, because the satire just hits home so well (the product is good).

jujodi 6y ago

Does this really happen?

accurrent 6y ago
Yes. Happened to a friend of mine who was doing an IoT startup. The github star metric is actually something the guy used. Unfortunately I don;t think it was his language choice that was the issue rather the github star thingy. Much of the problem is throwing a bunch of excellent engineers together without proper leadership will lead to severe under performance.
colechristensen 6y ago
I’ve seen it happen.
karmicthreat 6y ago
Resume based development definitely happens.
danjac 6y ago
Yes. Often times tech founders - especially if inexperienced - let the freedom and power of a complete greenfield project with no management oversight go to their heads. They've always wanted to build something in $cool_tech and now nothing stands in their way. That becomes the goal in itself, the business and getting customers and money being a far second. Their desires could be far more cheaply satiated with a side project, but this way they don't have to use $boring_stack in their day job.
- rkangel 6y ago
  There's an alternative presentation of the same facts: Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology. My actual beliefs are somewhere in between. I think the 'fast moving' world of javascript frameworks is a major contributor here as almost anything you chose in the last 5 years is obsolete. Not all tech stacks are predominantly web though. You might decide to build in Erlang/Elixir. You would be using something that's 30 years old, proven, not going out of fashion any time soon and the right tool for a lot of jobs. You'd be more productive in it than C++/Java, but that's what most enterprises would require.

justiceforsaas 6y ago

> We opened the floodgates. We shared the project on Twitter and Instagram, posted to HN and wrote a medium post. But, try as we might, no one was signing up. Later in the post: > Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in $ELITELANG instead. Our startup could have been a unicorn. Although this is satire, it's something a lot of funded startups do. They think they've solved user acquisition by getting investors money (hey, let's throw a couple thousands at Google/FB Ads, although there are 15+ viable acquisition channels we could try [1]), and spend time on building things in their own bubble. Also, the launch mention is pretty accurate: > We launched v2 of our product with a splash. Wonder if many startups would have better results if flipped the switch and treated product creation as a "launch" (a bunch of big sprints with a deadline) and user acquisition as something they do steadily, over a period of time. [1] https://zerotousers.substack.com/p/15-acquisition-channels-i-discovered https://zerotousers.substack.com/p/15-acquisition-channels-i...

sealthedeal 6y ago

hahaha HN Satire at its finest!

_wldu 6y ago

If they don't see the value, people won't even sign up for a free service. You have to build something that people actually want and need to use. That should be your first priority. Is there a real need? If there is, you'll get users no matter what language, platform or stack you are using. The constant technology change is just self comfort/pleasure and ultimately an expensive distraction. Look how busy we are. Look how cool our work is. In the end, no one cares about that. It's unfortunate that so many start ups continually have to relearn this basic truth.

mmaunder 6y ago

I wonder how many HN readers don’t realize this is satire. It’s unfortunate that they used the word customer once in the post. Total omission would have been so perfect. The point of the satire is devs navel gazing rather than focusing obsessively on who their customer is and their customers needs and solving that customers problems. There is a failure mode that has a dev team obsessing over building abstraction layers, tooling, automation etc and not writing a line of code that solves customer problems.

tomhoward 6y ago
But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned. It doesn't seem to be satirising something that actually needs to be satirised, as there is not a significant number of startups in the real world actually operating like this. A startup that operates like this wouldn't (barring a major mistake) get funding from YC or any other competent investor. The Silicon Valley sitcom is funny and successful because it satirises stuff that really does happen in the startup/tech/VC world (I know, I lived through much of it myself), but it noticeably doesn't stereotype founders as utterly clueless and hapless the way this piece does. With the sitcom, anyone who knows the startup world can point to real-world people/events on which the people/events in the sitcom are based. I don't think you can say that about this post. It's hard for me to believe the writer of this really knows any significant number of real-world startups.
- MarbleEmperor 6y ago
  Well this seems like much more of an internal thing that would really never make it to any sort of media publication. You never read about the internal shit-flinging that happens when a team of engineers has to decide on a stack, but it does certainly happen. At the very least I have personal anecdotal experience of this happening from a couple of companies I worked at. I can't think of a specific example, but when BLOCKCHAIN was the new kid on the block, every startup and it's mother just threw that word into their company somewhere somehow. How many of them got very far?

lukevp 6y ago

Hope this isn’t what’s happening with dark[0]. Saw the early demos and I think the concept is killer, and don’t see why they would focus on a rewrite instead of building on what they have. I never even got asked to pay for it before they pivoted? It kinda felt like giving up and going back to building something instead of marketing and selling what they had. I say this with much respect for what they built, and someone who also tends toward focusing on the technical when things get hard. [0]: https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/ https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/

pbiggar 6y ago
Hey, thanks for the mention! Happy to explain my thinking here. Regarding marketing and selling what we have: we tried that and it's pretty clear we're missing important bits, in particular packages for common vendors (stripe, slack, etc), and a package for user management, as well as common things like validation. People love the concept (as do you, thanks!), but were struggling to build things because of what was missing. As we went to build these, the tech/product debt that we had built up during our experimental phase really started to become apparent. We were missing common and expected things like user-defined types (maybe not important for dynamic langs, but we're a statically typed functional language, so being able to create types is kinda important), configurable (or at least changable) HTTP middleware, and a few other things. The reason for the rewrite is that had been taking long detours around our tech stack for a while. Now that there's limited resources (as in, just me), the cost of taking the long way to everything we build is just a little too high, so it feels like a rewrite (note: just of the backend, the majority of the code is in the frontend and doesn't need to change!) is necessary to get to product/market fit. I also hope it won't be the death of us. Fortunately, F# isn't a valid value for $hotlang! (Good thing I didn't pick Rust!)