15 ms·

RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

362 points by anhldbk 6y ago

nathcd 6y ago
(2017) There was a large discussion (948 points, 267 comments) at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608
spamalot159 6y ago
Really good write up. If you've ever listened to an episode of "How I Built This" from NPR, this is the opposite of that. But still equally informative and useful.
billconan 6y ago
is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad? developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.
- bravura 6y ago
  Creating a database startup is hard. Source: Friends who created database startups.
  - koolba 6y ago
    Databases are particularly hard because it’s the bedrock of your persistent state. Trust grows like compound interest and it’s very difficult for a new player to present enough value to compete at a non-zero price point.
- tdeck 6y ago
  Think about the developer tools and systems you use, then think "what would I expect to pay for these?" Chances are the answer is that you'd expect them to be free or you'd find something else. That's what makes it a bad market.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.
    - dreamcompiler 6y ago
      Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's not impossible to succeed in developer tools; it's just a lot harder than other markets. And you usually also need an accidental luck factor like being the perfect product at the perfect time.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        More like all dev tools that I can buy as an individual are easy to pay for. Things like a database would have to go through procurement if I wanted to use them and they weren’t free, and I avoid procurement like the plague. Why the hell wants to spend their time justifying why something is the best solution to people that don’t have a clue. I’d only go through that if the difference in quality was so palpable that I basically had no choice.
        spockz 6y ago
        Just some other anecdotal thing, but if you have someone from procurement worth their salt they will make sure to get the licenses at good terms without tying the company to lock-in, increasing prices YoY etc. Of course, if there is a free alternative, all the better, but if you need to buy something it is definitely worth being on their good side.
        dreamcompiler 6y ago
        I have a whole rant about procurement -- don't get me started. The basic idea is that procurement should exist to enable mission performers to do their jobs with less friction, while ensuring legal compliance and minimizing cost to the company. But in fact procurement organizations often seem to think they exist solely to impede mission performers. This is not really their fault; it's just how their incentives are structured.
- rapsey 6y ago
  The problem is that this market is also one that is familiar to every other engineer. It's is a terrible one to get into because developers hate paying for their tools.
  - mekster 6y ago
    With a modest pricing, I pay for stuff like JetBrains (even the full package), Office 365, Photoshop and TablePlus as subscriptions and some other one time payments that boosted my productivity. Stuff I don't pay is stuff I feel I can do better if I had some free time and rather gets in the way than properly solve problems and stuff that tries to charge more than what they're worth which can be said for many online developer services.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Did RethinkDB ever actually attempt to get people to pay for it? The massive, gaping hole at the heart of this analysis is "maybe we failed because we gave our product away for free as open source"?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - williamstein 6y ago
      Yes, my company paid for RethinkDB over a year before they shut down. They sold support to us for $100, and of course their engineers did far more than $100 of bug fixing for us. The reality was that RethinkDB was a very difficult product to create and when you pushed it hard in production it had some serious bugs. The other core issue is that pretty much the same unique problem RethinkDB solved for us (data storage and changefeeds) could be much better solved using a different architecture and better database (PostgreSQL with LISTEN/NOTIFY). https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.htm...
      - thu2111 6y ago
        A support contract for $100 !!! Wow, I thought I'd heard it all but that one is new. Even cheap consultants I know won't sell you only $100 worth of time.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Pretty much the entire sector is bad. In general, it's much better to be in a market where you customers cannot do you your job, not just one where they don't want to do your job. In the latter markets, they start asking "Why should I pay you to do something I can do myself?", or just start doing it themselves, and that holds down the price you can charge. This applies to a lot of familiar service businesses as well: housekeepers, gardeners, delivery/taxi/rideshare drivers, childcare, etc. Think of how much a doctor gets paid vs. a nurse vs. a home healthcare worker. The difference is all in skills that the provider can do but the customer cannot.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Valuable insightful comment - thanks!!
  - thu2111 6y ago
    But most companies could do things their suppliers do, because companies always have the option of hiring people with those skills and developing those competencies in house. E.g. Google moved from running their software in commercial datacenters to building their own, or how Amazon has progressively taken over more and more of the supply chain. Android is sold to firms that can build their own mobile operating systems and have done so in the past, yet it's still profitable for Google to do it for them. Fundamentally, business is about specialisation. Your customers always have the option of becoming jacks-of-all-trades but generally recognise it's best not to. Obviously if the value you're selling is so thin that your customers regularly and genuinely feel they could roll their own without incurring much cost, that's no good, but that's going to typically be the case in the early days before you had a chance to build up much value.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      That's an option in the same way that anyone can go back to college, specialize in pre-med, go to med school, complete residency, and then become a doctor. It's possible in theory. In practice, you're looking at a decade+ of your life, with significant risk that each step fails. So it is with companies bringing core competencies in-house. Each step takes time, and is fraught with risk. It's not a matter of simply hiring people with the right skillsets. You need to know what the right skillsets are, and how to judge them. You need to hire managers and executives to oversee them. You need to convince all of the above people that they should work for this new company that's just entering the market and may reconsider in a couple years, vs. stick with their bread and butter that's been doing it for decades. Company leadership needs to prioritize integrating the new competency, which often means challenging a lot of their assumptions about how the business works. Investors need to be on board: integrating your suppliers often does bad things to your margins and costs. Tooling and capital investments need to be made, and they can take years to plan out and execute. With developer tools specifically, the alternative to buying the product is often "We'll have a team of engineers spend a quarter or two building something that is specific to our needs", and no changes need to be made at the management/executive/personnel/financial levels. If, say, you're building a SaaS for a non-tech business, the alternative is "We need to learn how to manage software development processes, and hire a bunch of engineers, and get executive buy-in, and re-build the communication pathways in our org so this new division knows what to build." A lot of businesses actually try this, but the results have been predictably bad, and that creates a ready market for non-tech SaaS vendors.
- alexashka 6y ago
  I feel like the market for any fundamentally hard problem is bad, simply because it either solves a problem people didn't know they had, does it in a way that requires educating people for them to be able to use it or requires scale to be effective. Take the internet for example - before the internet existed, the 'market' for the internet sucked. For me, any company that failed due to solving too ambitious of a problem is the best kind group of people to invest into again and again until they succeed and succeed big. The people running it will have learned the easy lesson of solving a smaller problem faster, while retaining the chops to actually solve hard problems. All too often, people fail because they solve too small of a problem - there was a recent discussion about that on here regarding a macos calendar widget.
- wmf 6y ago
  You can monetize databases through DBaaS (as long as you avoid tying yourself in knots over "the AWS problem"). Developer tools that can't be implemented as SaaS are tricky. To break out of "developers making tools for developers" you need to get some domain knowledge.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  You know at some point in the last 20ish years, people really got used to the idea of free music. Once people get used to the idea of ‘free’, it’s like, good luck arguing against that. I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.
  - ornxka 6y ago
    This post requires a Hacker News Gold account to view.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      And it would be worth it. Never give an inch unless you want yards gone.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default? You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market. In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form. In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, underpaid labor, serfdom, like you know, these rare things that happened through the centuries. So yeah, I suppose that idea is ‘still working itself out’ two thousand years later. Fuck all that is my point, as many souls have been lost waiting for utopia. Ask the guys that built the pyramids.
- lmeyerov 6y ago
  The DB sector is great. As long as you have something differentiating, like a type of query that some businesses need, the growing market size and rise of DBaaS makes it super attractive because of conversion and stickiness. However... who you sell to isn't the people giving you GitHub stars and retweets, and they will have diff needs. if you lose sight of that....
- amelius 6y ago
  Apparently, you can make a five digit income from selling an IDE colorscheme. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989
  - iFreilicht 6y ago
    This sounded ridiculous at first, but after looking at it, I understood the value preposition. It’s a colorscheme, yes, but you pay for the consistent support of over 160 apps, which is a big deal IMO. Heck, every program under the sun seems to offer a solarized dark theme, but they’re all wrong in different ways and use different accent colors for different things, so I rolled my own in a lot of cases to get an actually consistent appearance. It’s a huge hassle, and just paying 80$ would probably have saved money compared to the hours and days I spent manually theming stuff.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  If you want to make any money in developer tools, the enterprise corporations are the best customers. Don't expect to make big bucks selling to single devs.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  It's great market but things are very competitive. If you are starting a business, you won't succeed unless you bring some unique value to the table. Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support. RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product. Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work. In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > just the db sector is bad? how is it bad when snowflake just had the biggest tech ipo of all time.
williamstein 6y ago
2017
the_linux_lich 6y ago
They failed because they focused on marketing features instead of essential ones like data compression.
nithinkashyapn 6y ago
Recent developments - RethinkDB is back and is being backed by the Linux Foundation
- keyle 6y ago
  yes I highly recommend it. There are quirks, the Go api is a little sketch (community effort) but otherwise it's been fantastic.
wideareanetwork 6y ago
I thought they failed cause unbelievably powerful databases are available totally free. What more reason is needed?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Mongodb has a 15b market cap, and mongo is widely derided.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      But it’s the only real player in their market Not at all. All of MongoDB is just a feature in Postgres, and Postgres does it better, and Postgres does hundreds more things too.
      - thesimon 6y ago
        >and Postgres does hundreds more things too. being hip, which is one of the most important factors for choosing a database database technology, is not one of them though.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        MongoDB is not in the same market as postgres. I don’t disagree with you, but the people that choose Mongo do not see postgres as a valid alternative.
      - gqewogpdqa 6y ago
        I like both databases. Saying that MongoDB is a subset of PostgreSQL is not right, IMO. They are both powerful databases. For legacy off-Oracle or off-SQL Server migration, PostgreSQL sure is an easier place to start (though you still likely have to re-write/re-tune your application). For new apps, you could start with either. The idea that PostgreSQL is a superset of MongoDB is incorrect. As some examples, PostgreSQL doesn't shard, have multi-region, multi-cloud, enforce JSON schema, data governance, full JSON support, etc. That said, PostgreSQL does do a lot of things MongoDB doesn't do. The two products have a big feature overlap - both are great databases. I think you could build a modern app on either one. If you want to build in modern languages faster and have a more available system out of the box, I'd suggest MongoDB. If you have legacy skillsets, legacy apps, or just love relational, I'd suggest PostgreSQL.
haolez 6y ago
"Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster." Huh?
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  What he means is that if you're completely ignorant about business, then reading a financial magazine will help you level up over time. (Related: I've worked with new managers in SV who couldn't define what the words "leadership", "responsibility", "planning" or "accountability" meant, since all they knew was PHP programming.) It's a good post mortem read. I gave the same advice about "use case" as in the post mortem to a YC database company a few years ago. The "founders" also thought they were building a better (technical) mousetrap, but I told them nobody was going to pay anything if it did the same as an existing database - it had to do something unique and be cloud-based, like Snowflake, or RDS. They were crestfallen, but still didn't listen to me. I even got hate mail from them before they went under - talk about being clueless to the bitter end. What RethinkDB did wrong was what was in their post mortem, but also not having experienced DBAs to review the use cases. As a DBA, my default is to say no to new databases, and being the audience, that would have been valuable for them to know. An example of how DBAs and devs think differently is the Jepsen database reports - devs fetishize those, but DBAs are like, "We already know corner cases aren't going to work most of the time. What's your point exactly?" Source: experienced DBA.
  - haolez 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I liked the article and was confused just about this part. I've browsed the Economist's site and all I could see was political propaganda and drama.
  - johnnycerberus 6y ago
    Hard to believe that reading a financial magazine written by journalists will increase your knowledge rather than an authority in the domain or a classic book on the subject.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
plorkyeran 6y ago
With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being <10M revenue stood out at me. MongoDB Atlas hit $85M revenue in Q4 2020 (https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mongodb-inc-mdb-q4-2021-earnings-call-transcript/ https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo...), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we might have a blog post about how they correctly predicted where the market would go and simply ran out of money before the market got there.
- alexashka 6y ago
  MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.
  - hewrin10 6y ago
    HackerNews is wildly detached from reality
    - mekster 6y ago
      No, I think it's more truthful than any other place with bunch of noises.
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Alternatively: capitalism optimizes for charlatans, not quality.
    - dang 6y ago
      Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - skolsuper 6y ago
akulkarni 6y ago
Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't written down anywhere (and especially not in magazines!), but that it's locked inside people's heads. At least, this is what has worked for me (TimescaleDB founder)!
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Very much agree with this point but for a different reason -- reading The Economist might be nice to get your feet wet with business/markets/investment-oriented thinking, but the vast majority of the stories you read in there are just not going to be relevant. Cocoa tariffs in some far flung place that are influencing the price of hot chocolate just aren't going to be relevant to your database SaaS, though it's certainly an interesting article, and that's the kind of interesting but not really relevant article that the economist often has. Also, generally the Financial Times is the better standard for strictly business related journalism AFAIK, maybe they're neck-in-neck. Spending 30 minutes to learn from someone in your field about how to get your next lead or which part of the internet you should be advertising to is a much better use of your time.
- mraza007 6y ago
  This is my favorite comment and I totally agree with you and more you talk to different people the more you discover and that discovery leads to some of the best ideas. Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product
  - akulkarni 6y ago
    Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product This is tricky - there is no one right answer. I would start by building something that you need ("scratch your own itch" as some people say). It's much easier to build the right thing when you need that thing. But also good to "sanity check" your instincts by checking in with people whom you respect and whom you think will understand the market better than you (which is what my parent comment is trying to get at).
jandrewrogers 6y ago
Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se, they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to sell a compelling solution to a somewhat boring but very valuable business problem that just happens to require an amazing database capability behind it. That’s your moat, the customer doesn’t actually care that there is an amazing database engine behind it but it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate. Filed under “lessons I learned the hard way”.
- spolsky-wisdom 6y ago
  Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astronauts-take-over/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
  - maaarghk 6y ago
    On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      And the return to timesharing systems.
roenxi 6y ago
The unspoken alternative in articles like this is that they don't know why they failed, or their view of the market is just not clear enough to form a judgement. The industry is still in an awkward position where software deals in 'intellectual property', but the concept was never really developed with an understanding of whatever it is that software is. Something like PostgreSQL for example isn't exactly a product, a service or a novel idea. Most of its consumers don't use most of its features. It is almost a perspective on a problem and some codified good design ideas. It isn't obvious if selling a perspective is profitable. There are a lot of winners in software that don't actually sell software. Eg, Facebook/Google sells eyeballs, Amazon sells infrastructure, Apple sells iPhones. MongoDB.Inc probably doesn't sell 'a database' if the details of their customer relationships were open for inspection.
- TriNetra 6y ago
  Indeed there's always some secret sauce in finding product-market fit - but it's always specific to every product! One can only discover it by toiling hard with customers and be opened for unbias evaluation of inputs coming from all the sides. There's no guarantee that you'll discover it for your product before you run out of the inner drive to toil.
abraxas 6y ago
This is akin to everyone’s dream to start a cozy, atmospheric coffee shop. These types of coffee bars fold very quickly or at best give founders years of servitude below minimum wage. The reason is that the type of behaviour this kind of establishment encourages - lounging, book reading, laptop work is exactly the opposite of the quick serve model that is conducive to high revenue. The customer loves this model, the owner hates it. Analogous to it, the nosql DB market is the exact wrong market to enter. Large companies willing to pay big bucks for enterprise features will pay established vendors for the stodgy but battle tested stuff like Oracle or DB2. The hipster startup market pays nobody for anything as there is a myriad of free choices in every common flavour and the few that will pay will mostly do so to purchase managed hosting. And that’s only if their PoC built on your new and untrusted database ever makes it to production. And then it’s probably your cheapest tier. Don’t be selling to paupers!
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  Interesting, I think this is why private clubs used to be a thing and may be the only way to get a sustainable cozy, atmospheric coffee shop. Because really that's what you're selling, not coffee, but atmosphere. And membership is a way to charge for your real product.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > private clubs used to be a thing They are absolutely still a thing in every major city.
  - aembleton 6y ago
    Or charge for time, like Ziferblat do: https://ziferblat.co.uk/ https://ziferblat.co.uk/
    - blacktriangle 6y ago
      That place looks lovely.
    - alamortsubite 6y ago
ianwalter 6y ago
> People wanted RethinkDB to be fast on workloads they actually tried, rather than “real world” workloads we suggested Uh no, It was slow on real world workloads, you just don't want to admit it.
- neonate 6y ago
  I think that's his point. That's why he put "real world" in scare quotes.
  - ianwalter 6y ago
    I dont think so because he could have said it plainly since it was generally slow, but instead he implied that the use cases users were trying weren't "real world" use cases that fit within what a database of its class should be able to do. Hes not being totally honest about the performance issues and how much of an impact it had on their failure.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
nonpolitic 6y ago
> Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]: > That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't—because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
- austincheney 6y ago
  So what happens then when a polished open source solution solves for a problem that developer tools cannot solve for? That speaks nothing of demand and only signals that there is no alternative supply. It also speaks nothing to the boringness of the hypothetical solution. I suspect by asking that question any reader starts immediately scratching their head thinking up what problem/solution that could possibly be. Don’t. That confuses product for business.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    Just because people want a super-wham-o-dyne tool doesn't mean that they are willing to pay for one. The cases of awesome well-polished open-source tools are frequently cases where the market wasn't willing to pay for them. One or few developers wanted it enough to build and release it for free, so they did it anyway. So yeah, that is speaking of demand. Economically-relevant demand.
- fastball 6y ago
  We're experiencing this a bit with our startup, except we're not building developer tools, we've built a (semi-personal) knowledge management platform. In the era of COVID, it seems like every developer with some extra free time has decided that they want to build their own PKM/note-taking/etc app, so competition has scaled up massively in the last year.
gigatexal 6y ago
What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05bdc2278d https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be gone from the web (https://web.archive.org/web/20201130215752/https://threader.app/thread/1124414461014462464 https://web.archive.org/web/20201130215752/https://threader....). It stands to reason this huge distraction played a role in the mismanagement of the database and why it ultimately didn’t succeed.
- cpufry 6y ago
  lol i didnt realise those tweets were deleted. that guy usually doubles down.
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  Eh, I think you’re way too quick to criticise him for it. He’s human, after all. And in love on top of it! Personally, I appreciate the frankness. Too bad it got deleted.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    What a romantic take on a failure of fiduciary duty towards ones employees and investors. Imagine being an employee there and thinking you’re going to change databases forever only to have the founder being distracted and then the whole outfit failing.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Um, you're obviously lying in this post here, contradicting the source material you link to.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  People write online way too much about their personal lives.
nojvek 6y ago
RethinkDB was great. They had better tech than mongodb. It was fast and consistent, rql was expressive and easy to lean. Sharding and replicas was easy. I wish they didn’t run out of money and give up. In many ways startups feel like you gotta be a cockroach. The goal is to not die and live long enough to be profitable where you control your own destiny. Like mongo atlas, rethinkdb’s hosted solution (horizon I think) could have easily taken off. Like Firebase’s Firestore, it could have been quite successful.
toolslive 6y ago
I distinctly remember their creative hiring tactics: They anonymously floated mysterious puzzles across the web. The solution was a domain name which had a static website yielding an email address. If you sent a email to that address they immediately asked you if you were interested in working for them. I know, because I solved one (The lure to solve the mystery was just too tempting to resist)
- mike_d 6y ago
  Google did this in 2002(?). I remember billboards in downtown Seattle with no text or logo other than [math problem].com.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Did you also end up working there? Or just solved the puzzle, got the offer but refused?
  - toolslive 6y ago
    I declared to be not interested. Just solved the puzzle to see what was behind that door.
ospider 6y ago
This is gold. I have seen a lot of "cool" startups that failed, and "not-so-cool" startups which do the dirty work for their customers so that their customer don't have to succeeded.
NetOpWibby 6y ago
RDB is fantastic, I’m using it today.
- pytlicek 6y ago
  You are right! IMHO RDB is a good piece of software. I'm using it on one side project and it is working good for all my needs
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
johbjo 6y ago
If the customer relationship is sticky and product/technology improves over time, it is more important to be quick than "mature" or "feature complete". When the technology matures (roughly simultaneously for all competitors), the size of the user base is what matters.
cryptica 6y ago
It failed because megacorps didn't like the idea of a database which could allow startups to scale from zero to hundreds of millions of users out of the box. Anyone who's had any affiliation with projects which aim for 'out of the box' scalability will know that these projects are actively suppressed and starved of funding and customers by corporate interests.
k__ 6y ago
I was baffled when they went down. MongoDB and ArangoDB did well so there seems to be a valid case for new databases. Rethink was loved by HN commenters. I used it in a startup I was working at in 2015-2017 and it was a pleasure.
supermatt 6y ago
I was under the impression that rethink db was not open source (until after it “failed”). That’s not a reason for failure, of course, but I have mentioned before that we (as in developers) often only choose things with permissive licenses, often to the detriment of the products we “support” (see the recent elastic drama, where we blamed elastic being forked by Amazon for being too permissive!).
- williamstein 6y ago
  It was open source from the start, but under AGPL which is a fairly restrictive open source license. I remember diving through the code trying to debug bugs in RethinkDB when using it in production long before they went out of business. See my blog post http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicense-now-what-is.html http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicens...
  - supermatt 6y ago
    Yeah, AGPL seems to be one of those licenses that aren’t popular here. I’ve never understood it myself - especially for something like a db which folks are generally less likely to modify. What would you say is the problem with AGPL? I was thinking of releasing a product under it myself.
geophile 6y ago
So much of this is familiar. I was at two database startups. The first one, an object-oriented database company (last 80s, early 90s) suffered from an extreme case of misperceived markets, due to the occasionally intentional blurring of the lines between a "database system" (which means SQL to nearly everyone, and we didn't to SQL), and a persistent storage class added to C/C++ (and later Smalltalk and Java). The second one (mid 2000s) was a neat physical storage trick, which should have been a feature of a database system, not an excuse for building a new one. My bad for missing this, but I really, really liked the physical storage ideas, so I joined. Building and selling new database technology is extremely difficult. There are successful, huge, entrenched companies. There is, therefore, no good reason for anyone to gamble on your new technology. Your only chance is to convince the architecture astronauts at some prospect that they just have to have your product, but the odds of such a decision sticking all the way through the delivery of their product is extremely low, no matter how good your technology is.
- assface 6y ago
  >The second one (mid 2000s) was a neat physical storage trick, which should have been a feature of a database system, not an excuse for building a new one. Can you say what database this was? Akiban? SchoonerSQL?
  - geophile 6y ago
    A cognoscenti! It was Akiban.
jwr 6y ago
As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interacted with competent, skillful and experienced developers. And yet MongoDB was the latest fashion fad, end even though it did NOT deliver on the promises, it was the hot-database-du-jour that kids used. The article is mostly about the business model, and I also always thought they would have a hard time making money on the database. But I think they would have had a much better shot if it became more popular. It didn't, which accelerated the company's demise. EDIT: I just realized that I wrote about RethinkDB in the past tense, even though it very much exists as I write it. In fact I run my business on it. But because it fell out of favor, when it was open-sourced, it failed to pick up momentum, and it now seems unlikely that it will. Which is why I'm working on switching to FoundationDB, and I'm slightly worried that it will suffer the same fate: it is excellent technically (the best transactional guarantees in a distributed database you can get), but difficult to understand and not very user-friendly. It's not the "node.js database for everyone". The only reason I'm considering it is because Apple uses and develops it, which gives me hope for longer-term maintenance. Going back to fashions — you can have a product which excels technically, but if it's out of fashion, it might as well not exist. I think we would all be better off if we stopped trying to always pick The One True Database, The One True Programming Language, etc — and instead accepted that there might be multiple tools, each specialized for certain kinds of tasks.
- nix23 6y ago
  DON'T switch if it works! A working system has nothing todo with "favor" or "momentum".
- manigandham 6y ago
  This is life in general, not just software development.
- Plugawy 6y ago
  I recommend reading this 3-part series on Mongo's marketing - it goes into a lot of detail why Mongo "won". https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html As a former RethinkDB user (we have migrated to Postgres) I actually don't miss it as much as I would - JSONB in PG does what we need, and the real-time features of RethinkDB never really delivered because of various performance issues in the database itself.
cubicmeter 6y ago
You can compare selling a database to selling git. Nobody is selling git itself, they sell the hosting around the tech, or create a dev workflow (gitlab) that uses git at its core. If anyone tried to sell git itself it would be impossible. I never used mongodb for reasons listed in the article. But there is free and open source and resilient postgres. the companies who succeeded around git did not build git. it would be a tough thing to develop both git and the hosting / workflow business around it. so I guess the lesson to learn is don't try to build extremely sophisticated software as a startup where there are already good enough open source alternatives.
carlsborg 6y ago
> To see how this plays out for other companies consider MongoDB (valued at roughly $1.6B with ~700 employees), Maybe another, important, lesson the RethinkDB team left out was: raise more capital than you need, and go public fast. Two years later, MongoDB the company is now valued at $19.491B. Like many other public tech companies, it is yet to turn a single profitable quarter, and is not expected to in the next few years. Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. Equity is negative. Perhaps because the market thinks useful product companies will be valuable vs. the US dollar in the future. And its a vital part of many companies infrastructure these days, without much of a solid enterprise alternative.
- gqewogpdqa 6y ago
  >Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. 2018: $154M 2019: $267M 2020: $421M 2021: $590M Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/financials?p=MDB https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/financials?p=MDB
  - carlsborg 6y ago
    You're right, thanks. 40% YoY revenue growth at size is considerable.
zackmorris 6y ago
I had such high hopes for RethinkDB as a free and open source alternative to Firebase. FB was a great tool, but was never the same after getting purchased by Google (I quit following its progress shortly thereafter). This article has less to do with databases or open source software than it does with the fundamentally misaligned incentives of egalitarianism and capitalism. I wish there was a social open source license that said "you can use this indefinitely as long as you pay us something". The price would be up to the user but the generally accepted polite minimum would be at least a penny ($0.01). Then businesses could publicly display their level of support (both initially and yearly) for the software they use, to attract customers. They could also be audited by the IRS, so a lack of patronage could correlate to a lack of equality and maybe even reveal corruption and other malfeasance. At the very least it would reveal a lack of internal controls. This could work kind of like UBI for open source. And I'm definitely not the only one who has ever thought about this. But there is just so much free capital floating around right now that it's a great time to be thinking about how to reform the paradigms that we all depend on.
skyzadev 6y ago
So, is the Economist any good? I'm thinking HN is a better source and it's free.
bilater 6y ago
Why is a 2017 article trending? Also isn't this the dude who had that 'this sounds like a parody but is actually how I hire engineers' article?
arnswarz 6y ago
lol of course. rethinkdb dies, thinks they need a post-mortem, and pushes blame away from their own incompetence.

362 points by anhldbk 6y ago

(2017) There was a large discussion (948 points, 267 comments) at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608

spamalot159 6y ago

Really good write up. If you've ever listened to an episode of "How I Built This" from NPR, this is the opposite of that. But still equally informative and useful.

billconan 6y ago

is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad? developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.

bravura 6y ago
Creating a database startup is hard. Source: Friends who created database startups.
- koolba 6y ago
  Databases are particularly hard because it’s the bedrock of your persistent state. Trust grows like compound interest and it’s very difficult for a new player to present enough value to compete at a non-zero price point.
tdeck 6y ago
Think about the developer tools and systems you use, then think "what would I expect to pay for these?" Chances are the answer is that you'd expect them to be free or you'd find something else. That's what makes it a bad market.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's not impossible to succeed in developer tools; it's just a lot harder than other markets. And you usually also need an accidental luck factor like being the perfect product at the perfect time.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      More like all dev tools that I can buy as an individual are easy to pay for. Things like a database would have to go through procurement if I wanted to use them and they weren’t free, and I avoid procurement like the plague. Why the hell wants to spend their time justifying why something is the best solution to people that don’t have a clue. I’d only go through that if the difference in quality was so palpable that I basically had no choice.
      - spockz 6y ago
        Just some other anecdotal thing, but if you have someone from procurement worth their salt they will make sure to get the licenses at good terms without tying the company to lock-in, increasing prices YoY etc. Of course, if there is a free alternative, all the better, but if you need to buy something it is definitely worth being on their good side.
      - dreamcompiler 6y ago
        I have a whole rant about procurement -- don't get me started. The basic idea is that procurement should exist to enable mission performers to do their jobs with less friction, while ensuring legal compliance and minimizing cost to the company. But in fact procurement organizations often seem to think they exist solely to impede mission performers. This is not really their fault; it's just how their incentives are structured.
rapsey 6y ago
The problem is that this market is also one that is familiar to every other engineer. It's is a terrible one to get into because developers hate paying for their tools.
- mekster 6y ago
  With a modest pricing, I pay for stuff like JetBrains (even the full package), Office 365, Photoshop and TablePlus as subscriptions and some other one time payments that boosted my productivity. Stuff I don't pay is stuff I feel I can do better if I had some free time and rather gets in the way than properly solve problems and stuff that tries to charge more than what they're worth which can be said for many online developer services.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Did RethinkDB ever actually attempt to get people to pay for it? The massive, gaping hole at the heart of this analysis is "maybe we failed because we gave our product away for free as open source"?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - williamstein 6y ago
    Yes, my company paid for RethinkDB over a year before they shut down. They sold support to us for $100, and of course their engineers did far more than $100 of bug fixing for us. The reality was that RethinkDB was a very difficult product to create and when you pushed it hard in production it had some serious bugs. The other core issue is that pretty much the same unique problem RethinkDB solved for us (data storage and changefeeds) could be much better solved using a different architecture and better database (PostgreSQL with LISTEN/NOTIFY). https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.htm...
    - thu2111 6y ago
      A support contract for $100 !!! Wow, I thought I'd heard it all but that one is new. Even cheap consultants I know won't sell you only $100 worth of time.
nostrademons 6y ago
Pretty much the entire sector is bad. In general, it's much better to be in a market where you customers cannot do you your job, not just one where they don't want to do your job. In the latter markets, they start asking "Why should I pay you to do something I can do myself?", or just start doing it themselves, and that holds down the price you can charge. This applies to a lot of familiar service businesses as well: housekeepers, gardeners, delivery/taxi/rideshare drivers, childcare, etc. Think of how much a doctor gets paid vs. a nurse vs. a home healthcare worker. The difference is all in skills that the provider can do but the customer cannot.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Valuable insightful comment - thanks!!
- thu2111 6y ago
  But most companies could do things their suppliers do, because companies always have the option of hiring people with those skills and developing those competencies in house. E.g. Google moved from running their software in commercial datacenters to building their own, or how Amazon has progressively taken over more and more of the supply chain. Android is sold to firms that can build their own mobile operating systems and have done so in the past, yet it's still profitable for Google to do it for them. Fundamentally, business is about specialisation. Your customers always have the option of becoming jacks-of-all-trades but generally recognise it's best not to. Obviously if the value you're selling is so thin that your customers regularly and genuinely feel they could roll their own without incurring much cost, that's no good, but that's going to typically be the case in the early days before you had a chance to build up much value.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    That's an option in the same way that anyone can go back to college, specialize in pre-med, go to med school, complete residency, and then become a doctor. It's possible in theory. In practice, you're looking at a decade+ of your life, with significant risk that each step fails. So it is with companies bringing core competencies in-house. Each step takes time, and is fraught with risk. It's not a matter of simply hiring people with the right skillsets. You need to know what the right skillsets are, and how to judge them. You need to hire managers and executives to oversee them. You need to convince all of the above people that they should work for this new company that's just entering the market and may reconsider in a couple years, vs. stick with their bread and butter that's been doing it for decades. Company leadership needs to prioritize integrating the new competency, which often means challenging a lot of their assumptions about how the business works. Investors need to be on board: integrating your suppliers often does bad things to your margins and costs. Tooling and capital investments need to be made, and they can take years to plan out and execute. With developer tools specifically, the alternative to buying the product is often "We'll have a team of engineers spend a quarter or two building something that is specific to our needs", and no changes need to be made at the management/executive/personnel/financial levels. If, say, you're building a SaaS for a non-tech business, the alternative is "We need to learn how to manage software development processes, and hire a bunch of engineers, and get executive buy-in, and re-build the communication pathways in our org so this new division knows what to build." A lot of businesses actually try this, but the results have been predictably bad, and that creates a ready market for non-tech SaaS vendors.
alexashka 6y ago
I feel like the market for any fundamentally hard problem is bad, simply because it either solves a problem people didn't know they had, does it in a way that requires educating people for them to be able to use it or requires scale to be effective. Take the internet for example - before the internet existed, the 'market' for the internet sucked. For me, any company that failed due to solving too ambitious of a problem is the best kind group of people to invest into again and again until they succeed and succeed big. The people running it will have learned the easy lesson of solving a smaller problem faster, while retaining the chops to actually solve hard problems. All too often, people fail because they solve too small of a problem - there was a recent discussion about that on here regarding a macos calendar widget.
wmf 6y ago
You can monetize databases through DBaaS (as long as you avoid tying yourself in knots over "the AWS problem"). Developer tools that can't be implemented as SaaS are tricky. To break out of "developers making tools for developers" you need to get some domain knowledge.
runawaybottle 6y ago
You know at some point in the last 20ish years, people really got used to the idea of free music. Once people get used to the idea of ‘free’, it’s like, good luck arguing against that. I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.
- ornxka 6y ago
  This post requires a Hacker News Gold account to view.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    And it would be worth it. Never give an inch unless you want yards gone.
- alexashka 6y ago
  Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default? You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market. In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form. In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, underpaid labor, serfdom, like you know, these rare things that happened through the centuries. So yeah, I suppose that idea is ‘still working itself out’ two thousand years later. Fuck all that is my point, as many souls have been lost waiting for utopia. Ask the guys that built the pyramids.
lmeyerov 6y ago
The DB sector is great. As long as you have something differentiating, like a type of query that some businesses need, the growing market size and rise of DBaaS makes it super attractive because of conversion and stickiness. However... who you sell to isn't the people giving you GitHub stars and retweets, and they will have diff needs. if you lose sight of that....
amelius 6y ago
Apparently, you can make a five digit income from selling an IDE colorscheme. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989
- iFreilicht 6y ago
  This sounded ridiculous at first, but after looking at it, I understood the value preposition. It’s a colorscheme, yes, but you pay for the consistent support of over 160 apps, which is a big deal IMO. Heck, every program under the sun seems to offer a solarized dark theme, but they’re all wrong in different ways and use different accent colors for different things, so I rolled my own in a lot of cases to get an actually consistent appearance. It’s a huge hassle, and just paying 80$ would probably have saved money compared to the hours and days I spent manually theming stuff.
pjmlp 6y ago
If you want to make any money in developer tools, the enterprise corporations are the best customers. Don't expect to make big bucks selling to single devs.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
It's great market but things are very competitive. If you are starting a business, you won't succeed unless you bring some unique value to the table. Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support. RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product. Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work. In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.
dominotw 6y ago
> just the db sector is bad? how is it bad when snowflake just had the biggest tech ipo of all time.

williamstein 6y ago

2017

the_linux_lich 6y ago

They failed because they focused on marketing features instead of essential ones like data compression.

nithinkashyapn 6y ago

Recent developments - RethinkDB is back and is being backed by the Linux Foundation

keyle 6y ago
yes I highly recommend it. There are quirks, the Go api is a little sketch (community effort) but otherwise it's been fantastic.

wideareanetwork 6y ago

I thought they failed cause unbelievably powerful databases are available totally free. What more reason is needed?

runawaybottle 6y ago
Mongodb has a 15b market cap, and mongo is widely derided.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  But it’s the only real player in their market. RethinkDB with MongoDB ‘performance’ would have blown them out of the water.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    But it’s the only real player in their market Not at all. All of MongoDB is just a feature in Postgres, and Postgres does it better, and Postgres does hundreds more things too.
    - thesimon 6y ago
      >and Postgres does hundreds more things too. being hip, which is one of the most important factors for choosing a database database technology, is not one of them though.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      MongoDB is not in the same market as postgres. I don’t disagree with you, but the people that choose Mongo do not see postgres as a valid alternative.
    - gqewogpdqa 6y ago
      I like both databases. Saying that MongoDB is a subset of PostgreSQL is not right, IMO. They are both powerful databases. For legacy off-Oracle or off-SQL Server migration, PostgreSQL sure is an easier place to start (though you still likely have to re-write/re-tune your application). For new apps, you could start with either. The idea that PostgreSQL is a superset of MongoDB is incorrect. As some examples, PostgreSQL doesn't shard, have multi-region, multi-cloud, enforce JSON schema, data governance, full JSON support, etc. That said, PostgreSQL does do a lot of things MongoDB doesn't do. The two products have a big feature overlap - both are great databases. I think you could build a modern app on either one. If you want to build in modern languages faster and have a more available system out of the box, I'd suggest MongoDB. If you have legacy skillsets, legacy apps, or just love relational, I'd suggest PostgreSQL.

haolez 6y ago

"Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster." Huh?

redis_mlc 6y ago
What he means is that if you're completely ignorant about business, then reading a financial magazine will help you level up over time. (Related: I've worked with new managers in SV who couldn't define what the words "leadership", "responsibility", "planning" or "accountability" meant, since all they knew was PHP programming.) It's a good post mortem read. I gave the same advice about "use case" as in the post mortem to a YC database company a few years ago. The "founders" also thought they were building a better (technical) mousetrap, but I told them nobody was going to pay anything if it did the same as an existing database - it had to do something unique and be cloud-based, like Snowflake, or RDS. They were crestfallen, but still didn't listen to me. I even got hate mail from them before they went under - talk about being clueless to the bitter end. What RethinkDB did wrong was what was in their post mortem, but also not having experienced DBAs to review the use cases. As a DBA, my default is to say no to new databases, and being the audience, that would have been valuable for them to know. An example of how DBAs and devs think differently is the Jepsen database reports - devs fetishize those, but DBAs are like, "We already know corner cases aren't going to work most of the time. What's your point exactly?" Source: experienced DBA.
- haolez 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I liked the article and was confused just about this part. I've browsed the Economist's site and all I could see was political propaganda and drama.
- johnnycerberus 6y ago
  Hard to believe that reading a financial magazine written by journalists will increase your knowledge rather than an authority in the domain or a classic book on the subject.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago

plorkyeran 6y ago

With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being <10M revenue stood out at me. MongoDB Atlas hit $85M revenue in Q4 2020 (https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mongodb-inc-mdb-q4-2021-earnings-call-transcript/ https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo...), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we might have a blog post about how they correctly predicted where the market would go and simply ran out of money before the market got there.

alexashka 6y ago
MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.
- hewrin10 6y ago
  HackerNews is wildly detached from reality
  - mekster 6y ago
    No, I think it's more truthful than any other place with bunch of noises.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Alternatively: capitalism optimizes for charlatans, not quality.
  - dang 6y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- skolsuper 6y ago

akulkarni 6y ago

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't written down anywhere (and especially not in magazines!), but that it's locked inside people's heads. At least, this is what has worked for me (TimescaleDB founder)!

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Very much agree with this point but for a different reason -- reading The Economist might be nice to get your feet wet with business/markets/investment-oriented thinking, but the vast majority of the stories you read in there are just not going to be relevant. Cocoa tariffs in some far flung place that are influencing the price of hot chocolate just aren't going to be relevant to your database SaaS, though it's certainly an interesting article, and that's the kind of interesting but not really relevant article that the economist often has. Also, generally the Financial Times is the better standard for strictly business related journalism AFAIK, maybe they're neck-in-neck. Spending 30 minutes to learn from someone in your field about how to get your next lead or which part of the internet you should be advertising to is a much better use of your time.
mraza007 6y ago
This is my favorite comment and I totally agree with you and more you talk to different people the more you discover and that discovery leads to some of the best ideas. Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product
- akulkarni 6y ago
  Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product This is tricky - there is no one right answer. I would start by building something that you need ("scratch your own itch" as some people say). It's much easier to build the right thing when you need that thing. But also good to "sanity check" your instincts by checking in with people whom you respect and whom you think will understand the market better than you (which is what my parent comment is trying to get at).

jandrewrogers 6y ago

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se, they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to sell a compelling solution to a somewhat boring but very valuable business problem that just happens to require an amazing database capability behind it. That’s your moat, the customer doesn’t actually care that there is an amazing database engine behind it but it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate. Filed under “lessons I learned the hard way”.

spolsky-wisdom 6y ago
Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astronauts-take-over/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
- maaarghk 6y ago
  On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And the return to timesharing systems.

roenxi 6y ago

The unspoken alternative in articles like this is that they don't know why they failed, or their view of the market is just not clear enough to form a judgement. The industry is still in an awkward position where software deals in 'intellectual property', but the concept was never really developed with an understanding of whatever it is that software is. Something like PostgreSQL for example isn't exactly a product, a service or a novel idea. Most of its consumers don't use most of its features. It is almost a perspective on a problem and some codified good design ideas. It isn't obvious if selling a perspective is profitable. There are a lot of winners in software that don't actually sell software. Eg, Facebook/Google sells eyeballs, Amazon sells infrastructure, Apple sells iPhones. MongoDB.Inc probably doesn't sell 'a database' if the details of their customer relationships were open for inspection.

TriNetra 6y ago
Indeed there's always some secret sauce in finding product-market fit - but it's always specific to every product! One can only discover it by toiling hard with customers and be opened for unbias evaluation of inputs coming from all the sides. There's no guarantee that you'll discover it for your product before you run out of the inner drive to toil.

abraxas 6y ago

This is akin to everyone’s dream to start a cozy, atmospheric coffee shop. These types of coffee bars fold very quickly or at best give founders years of servitude below minimum wage. The reason is that the type of behaviour this kind of establishment encourages - lounging, book reading, laptop work is exactly the opposite of the quick serve model that is conducive to high revenue. The customer loves this model, the owner hates it. Analogous to it, the nosql DB market is the exact wrong market to enter. Large companies willing to pay big bucks for enterprise features will pay established vendors for the stodgy but battle tested stuff like Oracle or DB2. The hipster startup market pays nobody for anything as there is a myriad of free choices in every common flavour and the few that will pay will mostly do so to purchase managed hosting. And that’s only if their PoC built on your new and untrusted database ever makes it to production. And then it’s probably your cheapest tier. Don’t be selling to paupers!

blacktriangle 6y ago
Interesting, I think this is why private clubs used to be a thing and may be the only way to get a sustainable cozy, atmospheric coffee shop. Because really that's what you're selling, not coffee, but atmosphere. And membership is a way to charge for your real product.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > private clubs used to be a thing They are absolutely still a thing in every major city.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Or charge for time, like Ziferblat do: https://ziferblat.co.uk/ https://ziferblat.co.uk/
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    That place looks lovely.
  - alamortsubite 6y ago

ianwalter 6y ago

> People wanted RethinkDB to be fast on workloads they actually tried, rather than “real world” workloads we suggested Uh no, It was slow on real world workloads, you just don't want to admit it.

neonate 6y ago
I think that's his point. That's why he put "real world" in scare quotes.
- ianwalter 6y ago
  I dont think so because he could have said it plainly since it was generally slow, but instead he implied that the use cases users were trying weren't "real world" use cases that fit within what a database of its class should be able to do. Hes not being totally honest about the performance issues and how much of an impact it had on their failure.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

nonpolitic 6y ago

> Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This is key, and plays out over and over again in different forms. There are no points for difficulty, only supply and demand. PG puts this well [1]: > That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't—because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

austincheney 6y ago
So what happens then when a polished open source solution solves for a problem that developer tools cannot solve for? That speaks nothing of demand and only signals that there is no alternative supply. It also speaks nothing to the boringness of the hypothetical solution. I suspect by asking that question any reader starts immediately scratching their head thinking up what problem/solution that could possibly be. Don’t. That confuses product for business.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  Just because people want a super-wham-o-dyne tool doesn't mean that they are willing to pay for one. The cases of awesome well-polished open-source tools are frequently cases where the market wasn't willing to pay for them. One or few developers wanted it enough to build and release it for free, so they did it anyway. So yeah, that is speaking of demand. Economically-relevant demand.
fastball 6y ago
We're experiencing this a bit with our startup, except we're not building developer tools, we've built a (semi-personal) knowledge management platform. In the era of COVID, it seems like every developer with some extra free time has decided that they want to build their own PKM/note-taking/etc app, so competition has scaled up massively in the last year.

gigatexal 6y ago

What’s with all of this seemingly whitewashing of history? Slava himself described why it failed. I mean as founder you have to be laser focused. Yet he was too busy trying to win over his “hot new employee” than focusing on the database. There is an archive of his deleted tweets here where he describes it: https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05bdc2278d https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/059310042193a2e143408b05... And then there was an article that seems to be gone from the web (https://web.archive.org/web/20201130215752/https://threader.app/thread/1124414461014462464 https://web.archive.org/web/20201130215752/https://threader....). It stands to reason this huge distraction played a role in the mismanagement of the database and why it ultimately didn’t succeed.

cpufry 6y ago
lol i didnt realise those tweets were deleted. that guy usually doubles down.
leadingthenet 6y ago
Eh, I think you’re way too quick to criticise him for it. He’s human, after all. And in love on top of it! Personally, I appreciate the frankness. Too bad it got deleted.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  What a romantic take on a failure of fiduciary duty towards ones employees and investors. Imagine being an employee there and thinking you’re going to change databases forever only to have the founder being distracted and then the whole outfit failing.
SamReidHughes 6y ago
Um, you're obviously lying in this post here, contradicting the source material you link to.
monsieurbanana 6y ago
People write online way too much about their personal lives.

nojvek 6y ago

RethinkDB was great. They had better tech than mongodb. It was fast and consistent, rql was expressive and easy to lean. Sharding and replicas was easy. I wish they didn’t run out of money and give up. In many ways startups feel like you gotta be a cockroach. The goal is to not die and live long enough to be profitable where you control your own destiny. Like mongo atlas, rethinkdb’s hosted solution (horizon I think) could have easily taken off. Like Firebase’s Firestore, it could have been quite successful.

toolslive 6y ago

I distinctly remember their creative hiring tactics: They anonymously floated mysterious puzzles across the web. The solution was a domain name which had a static website yielding an email address. If you sent a email to that address they immediately asked you if you were interested in working for them. I know, because I solved one (The lure to solve the mystery was just too tempting to resist)

mike_d 6y ago
Google did this in 2002(?). I remember billboards in downtown Seattle with no text or logo other than [math problem].com.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Did you also end up working there? Or just solved the puzzle, got the offer but refused?
- toolslive 6y ago
  I declared to be not interested. Just solved the puzzle to see what was behind that door.

ospider 6y ago

This is gold. I have seen a lot of "cool" startups that failed, and "not-so-cool" startups which do the dirty work for their customers so that their customer don't have to succeeded.

NetOpWibby 6y ago

RDB is fantastic, I’m using it today.

pytlicek 6y ago
You are right! IMHO RDB is a good piece of software. I'm using it on one side project and it is working good for all my needs

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

johbjo 6y ago

If the customer relationship is sticky and product/technology improves over time, it is more important to be quick than "mature" or "feature complete". When the technology matures (roughly simultaneously for all competitors), the size of the user base is what matters.

cryptica 6y ago

It failed because megacorps didn't like the idea of a database which could allow startups to scale from zero to hundreds of millions of users out of the box. Anyone who's had any affiliation with projects which aim for 'out of the box' scalability will know that these projects are actively suppressed and starved of funding and customers by corporate interests.

k__ 6y ago

I was baffled when they went down. MongoDB and ArangoDB did well so there seems to be a valid case for new databases. Rethink was loved by HN commenters. I used it in a startup I was working at in 2015-2017 and it was a pleasure.

supermatt 6y ago

I was under the impression that rethink db was not open source (until after it “failed”). That’s not a reason for failure, of course, but I have mentioned before that we (as in developers) often only choose things with permissive licenses, often to the detriment of the products we “support” (see the recent elastic drama, where we blamed elastic being forked by Amazon for being too permissive!).

williamstein 6y ago
It was open source from the start, but under AGPL which is a fairly restrictive open source license. I remember diving through the code trying to debug bugs in RethinkDB when using it in production long before they went out of business. See my blog post http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicense-now-what-is.html http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicens...
- supermatt 6y ago
  Yeah, AGPL seems to be one of those licenses that aren’t popular here. I’ve never understood it myself - especially for something like a db which folks are generally less likely to modify. What would you say is the problem with AGPL? I was thinking of releasing a product under it myself.

geophile 6y ago

So much of this is familiar. I was at two database startups. The first one, an object-oriented database company (last 80s, early 90s) suffered from an extreme case of misperceived markets, due to the occasionally intentional blurring of the lines between a "database system" (which means SQL to nearly everyone, and we didn't to SQL), and a persistent storage class added to C/C++ (and later Smalltalk and Java). The second one (mid 2000s) was a neat physical storage trick, which should have been a feature of a database system, not an excuse for building a new one. My bad for missing this, but I really, really liked the physical storage ideas, so I joined. Building and selling new database technology is extremely difficult. There are successful, huge, entrenched companies. There is, therefore, no good reason for anyone to gamble on your new technology. Your only chance is to convince the architecture astronauts at some prospect that they just have to have your product, but the odds of such a decision sticking all the way through the delivery of their product is extremely low, no matter how good your technology is.

assface 6y ago
>The second one (mid 2000s) was a neat physical storage trick, which should have been a feature of a database system, not an excuse for building a new one. Can you say what database this was? Akiban? SchoonerSQL?
- geophile 6y ago
  A cognoscenti! It was Akiban.

jwr 6y ago

As someone using RethinkDB in production for the last 6 years or so: I am really disappointed by how software development world is dominated by fashions and fads. RethinkDB was done really, really well. It is one of the very few distributed databases that went through Jepsen relatively unscathed and delivered on promises made. Development was done in the public, questions were asked through StackOverflow. You interacted with competent, skillful and experienced developers. And yet MongoDB was the latest fashion fad, end even though it did NOT deliver on the promises, it was the hot-database-du-jour that kids used. The article is mostly about the business model, and I also always thought they would have a hard time making money on the database. But I think they would have had a much better shot if it became more popular. It didn't, which accelerated the company's demise. EDIT: I just realized that I wrote about RethinkDB in the past tense, even though it very much exists as I write it. In fact I run my business on it. But because it fell out of favor, when it was open-sourced, it failed to pick up momentum, and it now seems unlikely that it will. Which is why I'm working on switching to FoundationDB, and I'm slightly worried that it will suffer the same fate: it is excellent technically (the best transactional guarantees in a distributed database you can get), but difficult to understand and not very user-friendly. It's not the "node.js database for everyone". The only reason I'm considering it is because Apple uses and develops it, which gives me hope for longer-term maintenance. Going back to fashions — you can have a product which excels technically, but if it's out of fashion, it might as well not exist. I think we would all be better off if we stopped trying to always pick The One True Database, The One True Programming Language, etc — and instead accepted that there might be multiple tools, each specialized for certain kinds of tasks.

nix23 6y ago
DON'T switch if it works! A working system has nothing todo with "favor" or "momentum".
manigandham 6y ago
This is life in general, not just software development.
Plugawy 6y ago
I recommend reading this 3-part series on Mongo's marketing - it goes into a lot of detail why Mongo "won". https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html As a former RethinkDB user (we have migrated to Postgres) I actually don't miss it as much as I would - JSONB in PG does what we need, and the real-time features of RethinkDB never really delivered because of various performance issues in the database itself.

cubicmeter 6y ago

You can compare selling a database to selling git. Nobody is selling git itself, they sell the hosting around the tech, or create a dev workflow (gitlab) that uses git at its core. If anyone tried to sell git itself it would be impossible. I never used mongodb for reasons listed in the article. But there is free and open source and resilient postgres. the companies who succeeded around git did not build git. it would be a tough thing to develop both git and the hosting / workflow business around it. so I guess the lesson to learn is don't try to build extremely sophisticated software as a startup where there are already good enough open source alternatives.

carlsborg 6y ago

> To see how this plays out for other companies consider MongoDB (valued at roughly $1.6B with ~700 employees), Maybe another, important, lesson the RethinkDB team left out was: raise more capital than you need, and go public fast. Two years later, MongoDB the company is now valued at $19.491B. Like many other public tech companies, it is yet to turn a single profitable quarter, and is not expected to in the next few years. Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. Equity is negative. Perhaps because the market thinks useful product companies will be valuable vs. the US dollar in the future. And its a vital part of many companies infrastructure these days, without much of a solid enterprise alternative.

gqewogpdqa 6y ago
>Annual YoY revenue growth is flat too at around $500m. 2018: $154M 2019: $267M 2020: $421M 2021: $590M Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/financials?p=MDB https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MDB/financials?p=MDB
- carlsborg 6y ago
  You're right, thanks. 40% YoY revenue growth at size is considerable.

zackmorris 6y ago

I had such high hopes for RethinkDB as a free and open source alternative to Firebase. FB was a great tool, but was never the same after getting purchased by Google (I quit following its progress shortly thereafter). This article has less to do with databases or open source software than it does with the fundamentally misaligned incentives of egalitarianism and capitalism. I wish there was a social open source license that said "you can use this indefinitely as long as you pay us something". The price would be up to the user but the generally accepted polite minimum would be at least a penny ($0.01). Then businesses could publicly display their level of support (both initially and yearly) for the software they use, to attract customers. They could also be audited by the IRS, so a lack of patronage could correlate to a lack of equality and maybe even reveal corruption and other malfeasance. At the very least it would reveal a lack of internal controls. This could work kind of like UBI for open source. And I'm definitely not the only one who has ever thought about this. But there is just so much free capital floating around right now that it's a great time to be thinking about how to reform the paradigms that we all depend on.

skyzadev 6y ago

So, is the Economist any good? I'm thinking HN is a better source and it's free.

bilater 6y ago

Why is a 2017 article trending? Also isn't this the dude who had that 'this sounds like a parody but is actually how I hire engineers' article?

arnswarz 6y ago

lol of course. rethinkdb dies, thinks they need a post-mortem, and pushes blame away from their own incompetence.