9 ms·

Amazingly, my startup (KubeSail.com YCS19) has similar revenue, has raised 500x less, and we've been told point blank that "nobody wants to invest in a hardware

Amazingly, my startup (KubeSail.com YCS19) has similar revenue, has raised 500x less, and we've been told point blank that "nobody wants to invest in a hardware company", or "yes, but what's the path to 100B". Hey maybe we don't have any path to 100B (is 1B just for chumps?), and maybe our margins aren't B2E-style 99%, but I'd much rather be making something people want rather than... And then I hear my wifes voice in my head: "You can't pay yourself that little forever...". Maybe I'm the fool. Strange world.

Zhenya 5y ago
Tried to check out your site, ‘clicked start for free’ on the homepage but got: “Bad request” Can I learn more?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- erulabs 5y ago
  Heh, maybe _thats_ why we don't have a 300M valuation! I shouldn't comment on HN while deploys go out. Fix going out currently, thank you!
  - catlifeonmars 5y ago
    Or maybe commenting on HN is a good way to get free user acceptance testing. Comment on every deployment!
lmilcin 5y ago
It is. Everybody just focuses on two possible outcomes that are easy to define -- what is the probability it goes bust and what is probability it is going to add a letter to FAANG. I think the answer is laziness. If you invest money you shouldn't care much about the size of the company you are investing. From a purely financial point of view should be looking at return on your investment where return is defined as an integral over all possible future payouts adjusted for their probability and adjusted for your risk tolerance.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  >I think the answer is laziness. If an investor wasn't lazy they wouldn't be an investor and have a real full time job, OR they would be Jason Calacanis. I'm not saying that they are bad people, I totally understand the appeal of getting a cushy, but potentially profitable job.
agentdrtran 5y ago
How does this differ from competitors outside of backups being included?
obventio56 5y ago
The VC model has to consider the expectation that most investments will be a complete loss. To have even a hope of ~20% return every investment has to have a path to $xxxB. Otherwise it’s not worth including.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Yes, this is a huge misunderstanding of where the returns from VC come from. It does not come from "moderate success". That's hopeless, given the fail rate. If you have a safe path to 20% or even 100% returns, just get a loan. There's absolutely not point in the VC process at that level... or reason for them to exist.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer. Undoubtedly, there are many successful founders with talent and brains that were able to exit successfully, and to those people, kudos. But a tremendous amount of immense family wealth is controlled by people that are in no way, shape or form smarter or more talented than the average person. Their wealth just demands an unhealthy amount of control and influence in whatever it is they're investing, regardless of how knowledgeable they are. I saw it in multi-family real estate about 5 years ago. A multi-family property company I was associated with was making an absolute killing (and still are) when all of a sudden, leadership wanted to start investing in AI because their investors demanded them to. They signed a massive deal with a custom software shop to build them an AI tool to decide which properties to buy, and the entire project was an absolute joke. It wasn't AI of any kind, it was just a dashboard that pulled data from various real estate APIs for things like walkability score, etc. But they showed their investors and called it "AI", who absolutely loved it, not knowing at all what actually was, partially because these execs were old school real estate guys that didn't understand themselves what the tool really was either. They raised millions more for their next fund, and the whole time I'm wondering how what this company was doing wasn't fraudulent. In the end, it didn't even matter, the next fund performed incredibly well and at the following Christmas party, one of the employees involved in the project received a $50k Escalade as a gift to reflect the success of the "AI" project. I will never again assume that just because someone has a ton of money knows anything about they're talking about.
- MegaButts 5y ago
  > I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer. You'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    If you did intelligence tests on 1000 American centi-millionaires and 1000 randomly selected Americans, do you think the difference in scores would be undetectable?
bachmeier 5y ago
Apologies in advance for providing unsolicited feedback... When I go to a landing page, I expect to be given a reason to give the company my money. (And in fact I'm hoping to be convinced of that, because it means my life is better.) I visited your landing page and do not know what problem you are claiming to solve. It looks like a competitor for Digital Ocean, but DO is easier to use and just as cheap. IMO your landing page should make me say "I want to give them my money so I don't have to think about [problem] again."
- erulabs 5y ago
  No need to apologize, I appreciate the feedback! I tweak our little initial landing page pitch lines all the time, and I feel like the current state is pretty bad. I'll see if I can't improve it :)
dougSF70 5y ago
I have a similar feeling. I must be the fool for not raising capital while money is so cheap, especially when I see firms raising 7 figures with no revenue nor even a product.
rossmohax 5y ago
I went on your page, and it looks like I am your target audience - relatively tech savvy, want to ungoogle myself, ready to pay for convenience of doing so, yet I got confused quickly. 1. What do you sell? Hardware or some kind of management software? Looks like latter, then why there is image of PiBox all over the page? 2. What is cluster? Is it a single PiBox/another Linux or something more? Word "cluster" implies to me there are many somethings grouped, what are these somethings? 3. Price plans mention proxied traffic. What it is and how does it fit into big picture? 4. I signed up, clicked add cluster -> "Bring YourOwn" and nothing changes, it still offers me to buy PiBox with shipping date in July(!! I know it's not your fault, but damn). How do I add my own "cluster" (whatever it is)? 5. Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now.
- zild3d 5y ago
  > Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now. a lot of sites do this, see github.com (I'm not a fan of the pattern)
- erulabs 5y ago
  Hi! Thanks for your feedback! 1. We sell both hardware and software, although our software works with almost any computer that runs Linux - it doesn't require our hardware and can run on anything that can run Kubernetes. Obviously, this is somewhat "the deep end" for many users, so our PiBox comes plug-n-play ready. 2. Cluster is a Kubernetes term, which we really should stop using, although we have a core value of educating instead of shielding our users - so we've tried to keep the "upstream" terminology as much as we can. It simply means "one or more Linux servers". Most of our customers simply run one machine as their "cluster", but a small handful have dozens of machines in the same group. 3. We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home. For most users, home internet connections aren't very good for this - the IP address changes often, and sometimes ISPs do not even allow port 80 or 443 to be exposed to the internet - we solve this by proxying traffic directly to your cluster, bypassing firewalls and avoiding the need for port-forwarding, router configuration, etc. This means you can plug in a PiBox, install, say, PhotoStructure, and access `photos.home.erulabs.k8g8.com` (for example), without needing to know anything at all about networking or firewalls or DNS. We also offer backups, as another example of trying to make home-hosting "complete". 4. Ack! I broke this last night! Thank you for pointing that out, fixed now! 5. You can click "home" in the footer, but yes, some polish there would be nice... One day we'll hire a proper designer ;) Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.
tomxor 5y ago
Here's a massively oversimplified and harsh view, but maybe useful to contrast different ends of the spectrum: 1. Get VC style investment, become unicorn, pay yourself 500-1000k a year immediately, ride the roller-coaster. Ending = derail ? feel burned, but have some dosh to show for it, possibly swallowing feelings of contempt towards investors due to overriding decision that forced you to watch your baby burn : Homerun, now watch everything you worked for be monetised into a souleless husk of it's innocent beginnings, you can't help but feel you sold out, quit once you had enough, dosh to show for it. 2. No investors, go the hard way, grow slow. If you make the right decisions, you will be able to afford to gradually increase your salary to something modest, and eventually perhaps even "good", you maintain full control of your product and peace of mind of ownership and decision making. OR, you keep making the wrong decisions, you burn through all your money, possibly burn through your enthusiasm too if you don't know when to quit. #1 can be risky for the soul 2# can be risky for the pocket If you aren't very materialistic and don't want expensive toys, #2 can be quite attractive because of the sanity you are able to create for your everyday worklife... the other thing is that just because it isn't a 100B business idea, doesn't mean it isn't a good business idea, it might just have a different scale, maybe it can't pay 10k workers and a pile of investors, but it could pay pay 10 or 100 people with the same salary, minus all the corporate BS... it just takes longer to get there. VCs want relatively quick money, but that is only applicable to certain ideas that can reach a certain scale, even then it comes at a non monetary cost that can be hard to stomach.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bhelkey 5y ago
I went to your homepage. So I can pay for a server to run backups and apps? The problem is that I have heard of exactly 0 of the apps you highlighted. Excluding backups, essentially the pitch is, 'Pay us money to run a server to serve apps you have never heard of.' Are Element, Jellyfin, NextCloud things you expect your target customers to know about? My perception is that Plex is moderately well known, I suggest you highlight that. Disclaimer: I work for Google, all opinions are my own.
- bhelkey 5y ago
  > KubeSail Platform allows you to provision software when your customers signup and pay. Spin up cloud resources on-demand, or physically ship your customers a plug-n-play device. I may have misunderstood, this appears to be B2B? Edit: I went on the blog. My current understanding is: "KubeSail" is the physical box (some sort of pi with a sata adapter). "KubeSail Templates" is some standardized wrapper around opensource cloud software. "KubeSail Platform" is some sort of B2B deployment platform for the open source wrappers.
colechristensen 5y ago
Oh that's neat, I had almost exactly that startup idea years ago, but it never got any further than describing it to some friends over a beer. Looks like you created something pretty cool!
brendonjohn 5y ago
There's clearly been a lot of thought put into KubeSail, the platform & pibox provisioning service looks interesting. Have you had businesses try to make this part of an internal provisioning process? It looks like you're aiming for hobbyists, but I'd take a guess you could be integrating with businesses at a premium.
- erulabs 5y ago
  We’re working on that, absolutely. The idea behind the KubeSail Platform is that businesses (or open source developers) can sell a fully loaded, pre-configured “box” that runs their software directly to their customers. PhotoStructure is one of our favorite YC friends - and for example - a “buy a photostructure box!” Button on their site will hopefully be a great source of revenue for both KubeSail and PhotoStructure. We’d love to sign some large enterprises (and we’re working on that too) but we’re extremely keen on making open source / self-hostable software financially viable for its authors (and easier to use for its users!)
  - mceachen 5y ago
    Author of PhotoStructure here: I'm really looking forward to adding that button to the site! I'm hoping that KubeSail can help my less-technical users self-host the stuff they care about. It's certainly a tall order, but it seems like the pieces are coming together...

Zhenya 5y ago

Tried to check out your site, ‘clicked start for free’ on the homepage but got: “Bad request” Can I learn more?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
erulabs 5y ago
Heh, maybe _thats_ why we don't have a 300M valuation! I shouldn't comment on HN while deploys go out. Fix going out currently, thank you!
- catlifeonmars 5y ago
  Or maybe commenting on HN is a good way to get free user acceptance testing. Comment on every deployment!

lmilcin 5y ago

It is. Everybody just focuses on two possible outcomes that are easy to define -- what is the probability it goes bust and what is probability it is going to add a letter to FAANG. I think the answer is laziness. If you invest money you shouldn't care much about the size of the company you are investing. From a purely financial point of view should be looking at return on your investment where return is defined as an integral over all possible future payouts adjusted for their probability and adjusted for your risk tolerance.

gitfan86 5y ago
>I think the answer is laziness. If an investor wasn't lazy they wouldn't be an investor and have a real full time job, OR they would be Jason Calacanis. I'm not saying that they are bad people, I totally understand the appeal of getting a cushy, but potentially profitable job.

agentdrtran 5y ago

How does this differ from competitors outside of backups being included?

obventio56 5y ago

The VC model has to consider the expectation that most investments will be a complete loss. To have even a hope of ~20% return every investment has to have a path to $xxxB. Otherwise it’s not worth including.

bpodgursky 5y ago
Yes, this is a huge misunderstanding of where the returns from VC come from. It does not come from "moderate success". That's hopeless, given the fail rate. If you have a safe path to 20% or even 100% returns, just get a loan. There's absolutely not point in the VC process at that level... or reason for them to exist.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer. Undoubtedly, there are many successful founders with talent and brains that were able to exit successfully, and to those people, kudos. But a tremendous amount of immense family wealth is controlled by people that are in no way, shape or form smarter or more talented than the average person. Their wealth just demands an unhealthy amount of control and influence in whatever it is they're investing, regardless of how knowledgeable they are. I saw it in multi-family real estate about 5 years ago. A multi-family property company I was associated with was making an absolute killing (and still are) when all of a sudden, leadership wanted to start investing in AI because their investors demanded them to. They signed a massive deal with a custom software shop to build them an AI tool to decide which properties to buy, and the entire project was an absolute joke. It wasn't AI of any kind, it was just a dashboard that pulled data from various real estate APIs for things like walkability score, etc. But they showed their investors and called it "AI", who absolutely loved it, not knowing at all what actually was, partially because these execs were old school real estate guys that didn't understand themselves what the tool really was either. They raised millions more for their next fund, and the whole time I'm wondering how what this company was doing wasn't fraudulent. In the end, it didn't even matter, the next fund performed incredibly well and at the following Christmas party, one of the employees involved in the project received a $50k Escalade as a gift to reflect the success of the "AI" project. I will never again assume that just because someone has a ton of money knows anything about they're talking about.

MegaButts 5y ago
> I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer. You'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- missedthecue 5y ago
  If you did intelligence tests on 1000 American centi-millionaires and 1000 randomly selected Americans, do you think the difference in scores would be undetectable?

bachmeier 5y ago

Apologies in advance for providing unsolicited feedback... When I go to a landing page, I expect to be given a reason to give the company my money. (And in fact I'm hoping to be convinced of that, because it means my life is better.) I visited your landing page and do not know what problem you are claiming to solve. It looks like a competitor for Digital Ocean, but DO is easier to use and just as cheap. IMO your landing page should make me say "I want to give them my money so I don't have to think about [problem] again."

erulabs 5y ago
No need to apologize, I appreciate the feedback! I tweak our little initial landing page pitch lines all the time, and I feel like the current state is pretty bad. I'll see if I can't improve it :)

dougSF70 5y ago

I have a similar feeling. I must be the fool for not raising capital while money is so cheap, especially when I see firms raising 7 figures with no revenue nor even a product.

rossmohax 5y ago

I went on your page, and it looks like I am your target audience - relatively tech savvy, want to ungoogle myself, ready to pay for convenience of doing so, yet I got confused quickly. 1. What do you sell? Hardware or some kind of management software? Looks like latter, then why there is image of PiBox all over the page? 2. What is cluster? Is it a single PiBox/another Linux or something more? Word "cluster" implies to me there are many somethings grouped, what are these somethings? 3. Price plans mention proxied traffic. What it is and how does it fit into big picture? 4. I signed up, clicked add cluster -> "Bring YourOwn" and nothing changes, it still offers me to buy PiBox with shipping date in July(!! I know it's not your fault, but damn). How do I add my own "cluster" (whatever it is)? 5. Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now.

zild3d 5y ago
> Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now. a lot of sites do this, see github.com (I'm not a fan of the pattern)
erulabs 5y ago
Hi! Thanks for your feedback! 1. We sell both hardware and software, although our software works with almost any computer that runs Linux - it doesn't require our hardware and can run on anything that can run Kubernetes. Obviously, this is somewhat "the deep end" for many users, so our PiBox comes plug-n-play ready. 2. Cluster is a Kubernetes term, which we really should stop using, although we have a core value of educating instead of shielding our users - so we've tried to keep the "upstream" terminology as much as we can. It simply means "one or more Linux servers". Most of our customers simply run one machine as their "cluster", but a small handful have dozens of machines in the same group. 3. We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home. For most users, home internet connections aren't very good for this - the IP address changes often, and sometimes ISPs do not even allow port 80 or 443 to be exposed to the internet - we solve this by proxying traffic directly to your cluster, bypassing firewalls and avoiding the need for port-forwarding, router configuration, etc. This means you can plug in a PiBox, install, say, PhotoStructure, and access `photos.home.erulabs.k8g8.com` (for example), without needing to know anything at all about networking or firewalls or DNS. We also offer backups, as another example of trying to make home-hosting "complete". 4. Ack! I broke this last night! Thank you for pointing that out, fixed now! 5. You can click "home" in the footer, but yes, some polish there would be nice... One day we'll hire a proper designer ;) Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.

tomxor 5y ago

Here's a massively oversimplified and harsh view, but maybe useful to contrast different ends of the spectrum: 1. Get VC style investment, become unicorn, pay yourself 500-1000k a year immediately, ride the roller-coaster. Ending = derail ? feel burned, but have some dosh to show for it, possibly swallowing feelings of contempt towards investors due to overriding decision that forced you to watch your baby burn : Homerun, now watch everything you worked for be monetised into a souleless husk of it's innocent beginnings, you can't help but feel you sold out, quit once you had enough, dosh to show for it. 2. No investors, go the hard way, grow slow. If you make the right decisions, you will be able to afford to gradually increase your salary to something modest, and eventually perhaps even "good", you maintain full control of your product and peace of mind of ownership and decision making. OR, you keep making the wrong decisions, you burn through all your money, possibly burn through your enthusiasm too if you don't know when to quit. #1 can be risky for the soul 2# can be risky for the pocket If you aren't very materialistic and don't want expensive toys, #2 can be quite attractive because of the sanity you are able to create for your everyday worklife... the other thing is that just because it isn't a 100B business idea, doesn't mean it isn't a good business idea, it might just have a different scale, maybe it can't pay 10k workers and a pile of investors, but it could pay pay 10 or 100 people with the same salary, minus all the corporate BS... it just takes longer to get there. VCs want relatively quick money, but that is only applicable to certain ideas that can reach a certain scale, even then it comes at a non monetary cost that can be hard to stomach.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bhelkey 5y ago

I went to your homepage. So I can pay for a server to run backups and apps? The problem is that I have heard of exactly 0 of the apps you highlighted. Excluding backups, essentially the pitch is, 'Pay us money to run a server to serve apps you have never heard of.' Are Element, Jellyfin, NextCloud things you expect your target customers to know about? My perception is that Plex is moderately well known, I suggest you highlight that. Disclaimer: I work for Google, all opinions are my own.

bhelkey 5y ago
> KubeSail Platform allows you to provision software when your customers signup and pay. Spin up cloud resources on-demand, or physically ship your customers a plug-n-play device. I may have misunderstood, this appears to be B2B? Edit: I went on the blog. My current understanding is: "KubeSail" is the physical box (some sort of pi with a sata adapter). "KubeSail Templates" is some standardized wrapper around opensource cloud software. "KubeSail Platform" is some sort of B2B deployment platform for the open source wrappers.

colechristensen 5y ago

Oh that's neat, I had almost exactly that startup idea years ago, but it never got any further than describing it to some friends over a beer. Looks like you created something pretty cool!

brendonjohn 5y ago

There's clearly been a lot of thought put into KubeSail, the platform & pibox provisioning service looks interesting. Have you had businesses try to make this part of an internal provisioning process? It looks like you're aiming for hobbyists, but I'd take a guess you could be integrating with businesses at a premium.

erulabs 5y ago
We’re working on that, absolutely. The idea behind the KubeSail Platform is that businesses (or open source developers) can sell a fully loaded, pre-configured “box” that runs their software directly to their customers. PhotoStructure is one of our favorite YC friends - and for example - a “buy a photostructure box!” Button on their site will hopefully be a great source of revenue for both KubeSail and PhotoStructure. We’d love to sign some large enterprises (and we’re working on that too) but we’re extremely keen on making open source / self-hostable software financially viable for its authors (and easier to use for its users!)
- mceachen 5y ago
  Author of PhotoStructure here: I'm really looking forward to adding that button to the site! I'm hoping that KubeSail can help my less-technical users self-host the stuff they care about. It's certainly a tall order, but it seems like the pieces are coming together...