8 ms·

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 we

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.
  - tdeck 6y ago
    Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.
    - glangdale 6y ago
      Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else: 'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.' https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lang=en https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...
      - ayewo 6y ago
        I chuckled a bit, but you and I know that devs are not savages :) I'd probably word it differently: Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to make their own shovels to dig for gold (because it is often cheaper than buying).
        glangdale 6y ago
        Based on the tools that I've often seen developers build in-house, "dig for gold with their teeth" is fair, much of the time.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Unless one works for boring corporations, it might not work for glam blog posts, fame and fortune, but I get to keep my teeth.
      - billconan 6y ago
        I mean, as a hobbyist, and for side projects, I would use my teeth. But for the company I work for, I don't care. I would recommend my employer the fastest and easiest tool. And my employer usually don't want to spend engineering time on reinventing wheels. If I were to launch a business in this market, the targeted customers can't be individual developers, more likely other businesses. Like gihub, individual developers who only use their free account are part of github's marketing team.
  - lelanthran 6y ago
    > I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you. Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use. A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of paying for developing the subset of $DEVSOFTWARE that they use. That limits what Atlassian can charge. Compare to selling a tool to accountants - it doesn't matter how much $ACCSOFTWARE costs, the accounting department will only shop around, they will never just write their own (outliers excepted, of course).
    - ThePhysicist 6y ago
      Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me. I agree though that you should never sell to developers, most of them really don't care how they spend their time as long as they are occupied and work on something they deem interesting, so they will happily spend months or years reinventing existing solutions if given the opportunity (I've seen this again and again). You need to sell to the people that run the company and pay the developers or to the engineering management, because they know how much their developers cost, and they understand ROI better than they do. That said often developers are quite creative when making up reasons why not to use an external solution or tool and instead write it themselves, so whether you succeed in selling to a company depends on who's ultimately in charge of technology.
      - brigandish 6y ago
        > Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me. I worked for one and you're right, it was madness. They still did it though.
      - jimbokun 6y ago
        The alternative to IntelliJ is not rolling your own IDE, but contributing to an open source IDE like Eclipse to get the same or similar features.
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.

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.
- tdeck 6y ago
  Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.
  - glangdale 6y ago
    Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else: 'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.' https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lang=en https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...
    - ayewo 6y ago
      I chuckled a bit, but you and I know that devs are not savages :) I'd probably word it differently: Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to make their own shovels to dig for gold (because it is often cheaper than buying).
      - glangdale 6y ago
        Based on the tools that I've often seen developers build in-house, "dig for gold with their teeth" is fair, much of the time.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Unless one works for boring corporations, it might not work for glam blog posts, fame and fortune, but I get to keep my teeth.
    - billconan 6y ago
      I mean, as a hobbyist, and for side projects, I would use my teeth. But for the company I work for, I don't care. I would recommend my employer the fastest and easiest tool. And my employer usually don't want to spend engineering time on reinventing wheels. If I were to launch a business in this market, the targeted customers can't be individual developers, more likely other businesses. Like gihub, individual developers who only use their free account are part of github's marketing team.
- lelanthran 6y ago
  > I think jetbrains, github, atlassian et al would like a word with you. Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use. A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of paying for developing the subset of $DEVSOFTWARE that they use. That limits what Atlassian can charge. Compare to selling a tool to accountants - it doesn't matter how much $ACCSOFTWARE costs, the accounting department will only shop around, they will never just write their own (outliers excepted, of course).
  - ThePhysicist 6y ago
    Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me. I agree though that you should never sell to developers, most of them really don't care how they spend their time as long as they are occupied and work on something they deem interesting, so they will happily spend months or years reinventing existing solutions if given the opportunity (I've seen this again and again). You need to sell to the people that run the company and pay the developers or to the engineering management, because they know how much their developers cost, and they understand ROI better than they do. That said often developers are quite creative when making up reasons why not to use an external solution or tool and instead write it themselves, so whether you succeed in selling to a company depends on who's ultimately in charge of technology.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      > Do you know any company that seriously wrote their own development IDE or project management solution comparable to Jira for internal use? That sounds like absolute madness to me. I worked for one and you're right, it was madness. They still did it though.
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      The alternative to IntelliJ is not rolling your own IDE, but contributing to an open source IDE like Eclipse to get the same or similar features.

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.