16 ms·

After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

549 points by gniting 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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ltbarcly3 2y ago
A failed startup is nothing to be embarrassed about, most of us don't have the guts to try it! You shouldn't expect much interest in the code, the value of a company's code without the business and people is quite negative when there isn't some technical secret sauce. Even if there was some technical wizardry people would just care about understanding how that one part worked and probably not use any of the code itself.
- dphuang2 2y ago
  Konfig founder here, 100% agree. I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use. I will say that one of our customers was able to deploy our docs platform for themselves while they find a way to deal with the blowout of Konfig shutting down.
  - MangoCoffee 2y ago
    >I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use. This is interesting. I used to work for a mortgage start-up years ago. They built several products for banks and home builders, such as a mortgage vault and tools for signing mortgage documents online. One condition I still remember was that bank customers required us to put our code in escrow, held by lawyers, in case the company went under. I always wondered if customers could rebuild the code, allocate more resources to develop and maintain it, or simply look for an alternative solution. they came to us for our solution. I assumed they either couldn’t build it themselves or didn’t want to invest in a custom solution.
    - jspiral 2y ago
      i have been involved in quite a few code escrow agreements but none that were actually used. i'd be curious to hear any stories about cases where that did happen. in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup
      - adastra22 2y ago
        I imagine that it is for either insurance or regulatory reasons. Someone upstream is nervous about the bank relying on a startup for its core infrastructure, and is only placated by knowing that the code is in escrow. They're not themselves programmers and don't know how useless the code would be without the institutional knowledge of the startup.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  True, having had a few increasingly less unsuccessful startups, a thing I learned the hard way is that: 1) You should not build a tech startup unless you have either a business plan for getting revenue quickly or shit ton of investment. And you won't typically get investment unless you have at least some notion of where the business is going to be. I've made this mistake. Techies mostly don't understand the business side well enough for this to work. 2) Most companies aren't startups. They are just companies. With revenue. That pay the bills. A startup is a company without revenue that is living on borrowed time and money. Especially if that's your own money, you need a plan for this. 3) VC funded companies mostly fail. A VC's business is to ensure that those companies that are going to fail, fail quickly. They fund their VC business with the handful of companies that don't fail and succeed spectacularly. So, getting "accelerated" or "funded" doesn't mean that you are on a path to success. It actually means you are on the spot to beat the odds and that you don't have a lot of time left. Chances are that you will fail quickly. 4) If you are a successful company with revenue, you don't need VCs. So you should question why you are talking to them at all? Are you struggling to make revenue? A VC won't fix that. 5) A lot of VCs are lazy and don't get interested until you are already successful. There is a weird dynamic here where companies get funded early and then fail. Or don't get funded and then succeed. My current company is four years into being completely bootstrapped. As in we struggle with revenue and we put in our time when able. I mostly live off consultancy that I do on the side. The company just had its third most successful year in a row and is getting close to where I should be able to retire as a consultant soonish and focus on the business instead. But it's been a long journey. As for open source. I open source anything that is not business specific or part of our core IP. One good reason for this is that I hate rebuilding the same crap when I start my next company. I've been through this and that kind of stuff just slows you down. People obsess about intellectual property in startups. The reality is that most software is not that valuable. But you still need to spend time, money, and energy building it. So, I contribute a lot of tools, frameworks and what not of which I am the main user. Just so I can continue to use that stuff on the next project.
codingdave 2y ago
This is not the first story I've heard of a product that isn't quite right, but when deciding where to pivot, fell into AI as the answer and then failed. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - when we figure out what AI is good at and what it is not, we will start treating it as a tool instead of a goal, and our product ideation will stabilize.
- ltbarcly3 2y ago
  Are you saying AI can't rescue a bad product idea by automating things? Like more efficiently doing something nobody wants done isn't a business?
  - slowmovintarget 2y ago
    My opinion: In software, the best use of AI is to create a do-what-I-mean UI. That is so-called AI (more to the point, use of LLMs and vision, speech, and audio processing) can allow new modes of interface that help a user operate the computer and achieve something that was nearly impossible with the user at the raw controls. This will not produce superior work to someone who knows what they're doing at the controls. A competent programmer doesn't need this. An excellent touch typist doesn't need this. But let's say someone who has a vague idea of what outcome they want, but an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms to get there, can get further with a do-what-I-mean UI.
    - stuartjohnson12 2y ago
      Probably true with a more nuanced definition of "knowing what you're doing". I'm pretty good at writing code, Cursor is faster.
    - NoGravitas 2y ago
      As long as the consequences of then producing something which was not-quite-what-they-mean but them being unable to recognize that are not too high.
      - 2y ago
williamstein 2y ago
> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?
- dgellow 2y ago
  That's what we do at Stainless. By curiosity, what languages are you looking for?
- ddorian43 2y ago
  liblab.com All others are too expensive at ~250$/language/month (still less expensive than human developer).
- ndimares 2y ago
  Caveat that I work for Speakeasy, but there are a few tools you can look at: - Speakeasy - Fern - Stainless First SDK with Speakeasy is free and we also have discounts for companies who are just starting out. Feel free to shoot me an email if we can be useful: nolan@spakeasy.com :)
  - NetOpWibby 2y ago
    Typo in your email btw
    - ndimares 2y ago
      I'd like to say this was a clever ruse so that real people could reach me and bots wouldn't, but that'd be a lie. I just fat fingered it.
- xnx 2y ago
  https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator has 22K stars
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Although the code dump could be interesting, this appears to have no license attached. Making it properly open source would make it a lot more useful.
- mkl 2y ago
  An MIT LICENSE file was added about an hour after your comment.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Fantastic, that's great:)
popalchemist 2y ago
I remember Konfig. Sorry you couldn't find fit, but great work nonetheless. About the code - would you be willing to add an MIT License? I don't see the code being used without a permissive license.
- kaoD 2y ago
  There's a LICENSE file. MIT in particular. https://github.com/konfig-dev/konfig/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/konfig-dev/konfig/blob/main/LICENSE
  - popalchemist 2y ago
    Ah. It would show up in your repo's metadata if it were in the root directory.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
CodeWriter23 2y ago
Admiring your courage in dumping your repo raw and uncut.
- mrbluecoat 2y ago
  I agree, this was a really touching admission: > Looking back to March 2022 when I left my job to pursue this startup full-time, I have absolutely no regrets. I knew the risks—that failure was a very real possibility—but I also knew I had to take this chance. Today, even as we close this chapter, I'm grateful for the failure because it has taught me more than success ever could.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
asdev 2y ago
Thank you for sharing. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business." I think we are unfortunately going to see this outcome appear a lot in the near future as the AI bubble pops
- zahlman 2y ago
  Am I the only one who would respect the effort more if it had instead been written like so? >We then decided to try using generative AI in a vertical B2B SaaS product, believing we could solve previously unsolved problems this way. We came up with and pitched multiple ideas, but user feedback was never positive enough to give us confidence that we were on the right track to build a huge business. As is, my first impression is something like: "Jeez, whoever wrote this is firmly embedded in a niche fly-by-night culture that instinctively turns me off, and now can't psychologically shake free even immediately after crashing and burning".
- shusaku 2y ago
  Open sourcing your code and giving up is the ultimate pivot to AI - the new models will learn what you did and someday do it better (?).
gortok 2y ago
> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business." How many wonderful niche products would be around if their owners had tried for a small business instead of a 'huge business' with 'hyper growth'?
- ed 2y ago
  There seems to be a subtext here of “see? I told you it was hard!” Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google instead of a Basecamp. They’re different kinds of company. If anything it’s easy to underestimate the risk of building a low-risk business. They’re all hard. Kudos to Konfig!
  - bachmeier 2y ago
    > Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google Sure there is. The probability of success is as good as zero. In all seriousness, a better business model is buying $1000 a month in lottery tickets. You have the same chance of success, you can do it on the side while working your job, and if you do hit the jackpot you don't have to do any additional work. This particular business has no path to being a Google but it might have a shot at being a Basecamp.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      Your mental model of startups is a lottery? Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”. Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.
      - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
farceSpherule 2y ago
A product in search of a problem…
deadbabe 2y ago
Has there ever been a scenario where someone gave up on a startup, dumped the code, then someone picked it up and turned it into a successful business?
- gkoberger 2y ago
  This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/ https://maybefinance.com/) A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.
- reboothed 2y ago
  Close but not quite (and keeping some parts intentionally vague): There was a data startup ran for ~3y until the 10 person team imploded in a tough market. Everyone left or was laid off, the office was closed, operations ceded etc. The website and some collection were still left running in zombie mode. A couple of years later, the non-technical founder and CEO (who at this point had bought everyone else out) saw demand and PMF emerging. Mostly through serendipity, I was one of 3 people brought in to "see what we can do with it", originally intended as a 3 month project. We came in with zero context and jumped right in to figuring out the ship we were now sailing. I was able to have one or two of conversation with the previous CTO but that was about it in terms of overlap. Things progressed and within a few months we found ourselves as co-founders of "Company v2.0". My partner took over as CEO. I left after 2y around our series A when we were 20~30 employees and arguably a leader in our market segment. At that point there were significant and crucial parts of the stack and codebase inherited (and evolved obv) from the original efforts by the previous team. The company is now an established brand, have offices in several countries and had a successful series B last year.
- dboreham 2y ago
  There are some legal risks with this. Having an OSS license from the copyright holder to use the code is not the same as being the copyright holder.
gkoberger 2y ago
Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things. Hacker News was always good to us, especially as I was more vulnerable. I'd love to hear more! I'm going to reach out privately :) Overall, though, congrats on all the work you put in. It's incredibly hard to start a company and believe in yourself, and you should be proud!
- livearchivist 2y ago
  This was super wholesome and made my day
- k0ns0l 2y ago
  :-)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- anonu 2y ago
  You might have been successful, compared to konfig, because it looks like you had an 8-year headstart. It could be that konfig was a fine idea and well executed, just not at the right time.
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    Maybe, but there’s a number of companies in the SDK space that popped up the past 3 years and are seemingly successful. And there were a number of companies back when we started that are no longer around.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  Since you're here, I wanted to say that the css transition on readme's login has stuck with me as the strongest branding element I can recall. Kudos to whomever came up with that because it is just excellent
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
bwood 2y ago
As a customer of Konfig, I am super bummed about this. I think we may even have been their first customer (referenced in the init commit). Dylan and Anh-Tuan solved a number of real problems for us, and they did it spectacularly. They essentially provided a one-stop-shop for generated SDKs and beautiful hosted docs/tutorials that would call our API and immediately allow users to start playing with real data. Prior to Konfig, we were hand-writing a hodgepodge of SDKs to wrap our API and using ReadMe to host the docs (which never quite worked interactively with our API due to request signing that we require on our API). We're self-hosting the docs now thanks to Konfig open-sourcing it: https://docs.snaptrade.com/ https://docs.snaptrade.com/ Tons of respect for these guys and I wish they'd found a way to make it work. Also, for anyone finding themselves in a similar situation as Konfig (a product that (some? most? all?) customers love, but revenue not scaling as needed), please consider charging more. We probably would have paid 2-3x what Konfig was charging us and more as we grow, but they never asked and never built in any usage-based cost scaling (like $X/month/SDK, $Y/month/demo, etc).
- gnuly 2y ago
  I got to know about konfig from your product itself. The docs were(maybe still are?) so good that I had to check what was behind it. It really is better than swagger/redoc.
- cess11 2y ago
  Did you try to use https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator directly?
  - that_guy_iain 2y ago
    There are multiple open-source tools backed by large companies to do this. I use one of them for my sdks. So I can really understand how they could struggle to sell it, it's a hard sale to sell someone a commercial product that does pretty much the same as free open-source projects. I was tempted to check it out but as bad as it sounds even with it being open source and free I couldn't find a reason to spend the time over just using what I have now.
andrewstuart 2y ago
"I Failed". YOU didn't fail. Your business failed. It's an important distinction. You are not your business - for your mental health.
- tugu77 2y ago
  That catchy title is what brought it to the HN front page though.
jaza 2y ago
Good on you for open sourcing the code. Its destiny may yet be as a hidden gem that makes some peoples' lives better. In which case, not what I'd call a failure.
newusertoday 2y ago
from the bottom of my heart thank you @dylanhuang . Releasing it without modification gives us rare opportunity to inspect the codebase of actual startup that had paid customers. Its more valuable than polished/redacted versions.
Woshiwuja 2y ago
[dead]
tugu77 2y ago
Not every little idea, as useful as it might be, needs to turn into a hyper-growth business. Just make it an open source project on the side. If it gets popular then you get famous and hopefully some big company finds it so useful that they hire you and let you work on it full time. Konfig seems like a perfect example for this.
thecleaner 2y ago
Remarkable show of persistence. Honestly, I really like that the Repo is as-is. Congratulations on the journey, hope you learnt a ton. PS - you built some of your static content on Docusaurus, a Meta open source project. They're hiring like crazy. Maybe you get to work on that one.
simmo9000 2y ago
Well done having a go. Most don't. Publishing your results makes you part of history. Respect.
stunt 2y ago
He is young. At that age, I tried multiple times and failed each time. I did manage to sell one and it earned me good money. At that age you have plenty of time to pursue many things but you often lack the experience needed to succeed in the B2B market. You definitely need support from someone with sufficient B2B experience, or you might have better luck focusing on something in the B2C space. My only advice if he really wants to continue pursuing B2B is to find a partner who can sell the product. Selling is a full-time job on its own.
ianpurton 2y ago
The developer tools market is REALLY difficult. Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]". No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.
- presentation 2y ago
  That said most developers don’t have any awareness of problems outside of those they experience… which tend to be developer tooling issues. So you get a ton of companies building dev tools startups despite an incredible amount of need elsewhere. I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.
  - acuozzo 2y ago
    > if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission. Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introduction of new unknowns/things-to-check adds enough uncertainty to make them uncomfortable. "The new thing always puts things here instead of there and it doesn't handle these cases. I miss the way we used to do things."
    - presentation 2y ago
      Yeah, finding the right people with enough mental flexibility but who understand the challenges of a different domain is rare but super valuable.
- olavgg 2y ago
  Not really true, but dealing with 50x 10 USD invoices is not something I want to waste time on. Is there a business that can bundle different services with just one invoice? Or do I still have to use AWS, Azure, GCloud?
block_dagger 2y ago
It takes a strong will to admit so publicly that you failed and to release unpolished code. I’m sure many will benefit from your efforts. Bravo.
Hendrikto 2y ago
> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be huge. Businesses should focus more on sustainability, and not shut down after 2–3 years after pivoting three times.
- herbturbo 2y ago
  Thank VCs who only exist to find a unicorn to keep their LPs investing so they can charge their 2 and 20.
- jf22 2y ago
  I don't understand this criticism. Most businesses aren't hyperscale. Some businesses are hyperscale because that's what people want to invest in.
- dagw 2y ago
  American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd think of that has a big success. In the US they may very well think of that as failure, especially if they are VC funded. I remember hearing a SV VC straight up say that if you consider selling your company for $50 million a win, the you don't have the right mindset and he doesn't want to do business with you. If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize. And while this might be healthier for you as an individual, it's bad for the Economy.
  - thisisabore 2y ago
    Yes, but SV VC are not known for being wise people you look to for life advice. It's a bit like asking for forest safety advice from drunk hunters.
mettamage 2y ago
Awesome, will be learning a lot from this. I feel this is much of an operational playbook as one could get.
mcnichol 2y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand kudos to them for the self-reflection, facing hard truths, and building a really wide set of tools. But when you look under the hood it's tooling that wraps tooling. The API categorization tool arguably hands off a large portion of the heavy lifting to OpenAI. "You are a world class categorizer. Fit these APIs into one of these groups." The rest of the file is just wiring and a little blurring of the lines of model, view, and controller. I saw some testing and was like, okay this is going to be important if you are wrapping a lot of tooling because "change outside of your control" but then it's just a the default contextLoads() functional test Intellij gives that makes sure dependencies exist and nothing fails at compile. I think the vision is there and it is definitely aligned to the Pareto principle but it feels like the idea was tested that markets aren't interested in maintaining their stuff while internally they haven't even addressed maintaining their own stuff. Feels like a Catch 22 where if they could address that reason for themselves first then they could probably solve that for other people. But addressing it means having a product that is being used in order to feel the pain and empathize with the end user.
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
yeah, "software developers" is notoriously one of the toughest markets
vkweb 2y ago
I would prefer to build a sustainable business and live a calm life. :D
vitro 2y ago
Well, with Latudio [1] a language learning app, we're 6 years in since the first line of code and we still haven't thrown in the towel even if we have little traction. But we still do those small little steps and hope they add up so we have a snowball big enough that it starts rolling by itself, perhaps, one day. In my mind, I also had a thought that we would rise and be huge, but I let go of that one. Instead, we just put one foot in front of the other and what warms my heart are those stories like when a person in Uganda got so confident thanks to our app that he opened his own language school. For this it makes sense to continue. What I want now is just to have a nice work/family balance and the app paying my bills and something extra. That would be a great start. [1] https://www.latudio.com https://www.latudio.com
sbochins 2y ago
“It’s refreshing to see a founder’s honest postmortem that doesn’t just blame ‘bad timing’ or ‘market conditions.’ Instead, he’s ripping off the Band-Aid and laying bare the pain points—no hype, no quiet pivot into mediocrity. It’s the kind of retrospective that should be required reading before your next ‘growth hack’ session: get the fundamentals right or prepare to pen your own ‘closing up shop’ blog post.”
Loxicon 2y ago
What is absolutely wild to me is how many developers build "developer focused tools". That is the red'est sea to swim in as a small dev because it's easy to build things you can use every day. I have a lot of friends who build tools in book shops, martech, payments and other niches. There are so many markets people. Most of them are unknown, and therefore, low comp.

549 points by gniting 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

A failed startup is nothing to be embarrassed about, most of us don't have the guts to try it! You shouldn't expect much interest in the code, the value of a company's code without the business and people is quite negative when there isn't some technical secret sauce. Even if there was some technical wizardry people would just care about understanding how that one part worked and probably not use any of the code itself.

dphuang2 2y ago
Konfig founder here, 100% agree. I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use. I will say that one of our customers was able to deploy our docs platform for themselves while they find a way to deal with the blowout of Konfig shutting down.
- MangoCoffee 2y ago
  >I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use. This is interesting. I used to work for a mortgage start-up years ago. They built several products for banks and home builders, such as a mortgage vault and tools for signing mortgage documents online. One condition I still remember was that bank customers required us to put our code in escrow, held by lawyers, in case the company went under. I always wondered if customers could rebuild the code, allocate more resources to develop and maintain it, or simply look for an alternative solution. they came to us for our solution. I assumed they either couldn’t build it themselves or didn’t want to invest in a custom solution.
  - jspiral 2y ago
    i have been involved in quite a few code escrow agreements but none that were actually used. i'd be curious to hear any stories about cases where that did happen. in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup
    - adastra22 2y ago
      I imagine that it is for either insurance or regulatory reasons. Someone upstream is nervous about the bank relying on a startup for its core infrastructure, and is only placated by knowing that the code is in escrow. They're not themselves programmers and don't know how useless the code would be without the institutional knowledge of the startup.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
True, having had a few increasingly less unsuccessful startups, a thing I learned the hard way is that: 1) You should not build a tech startup unless you have either a business plan for getting revenue quickly or shit ton of investment. And you won't typically get investment unless you have at least some notion of where the business is going to be. I've made this mistake. Techies mostly don't understand the business side well enough for this to work. 2) Most companies aren't startups. They are just companies. With revenue. That pay the bills. A startup is a company without revenue that is living on borrowed time and money. Especially if that's your own money, you need a plan for this. 3) VC funded companies mostly fail. A VC's business is to ensure that those companies that are going to fail, fail quickly. They fund their VC business with the handful of companies that don't fail and succeed spectacularly. So, getting "accelerated" or "funded" doesn't mean that you are on a path to success. It actually means you are on the spot to beat the odds and that you don't have a lot of time left. Chances are that you will fail quickly. 4) If you are a successful company with revenue, you don't need VCs. So you should question why you are talking to them at all? Are you struggling to make revenue? A VC won't fix that. 5) A lot of VCs are lazy and don't get interested until you are already successful. There is a weird dynamic here where companies get funded early and then fail. Or don't get funded and then succeed. My current company is four years into being completely bootstrapped. As in we struggle with revenue and we put in our time when able. I mostly live off consultancy that I do on the side. The company just had its third most successful year in a row and is getting close to where I should be able to retire as a consultant soonish and focus on the business instead. But it's been a long journey. As for open source. I open source anything that is not business specific or part of our core IP. One good reason for this is that I hate rebuilding the same crap when I start my next company. I've been through this and that kind of stuff just slows you down. People obsess about intellectual property in startups. The reality is that most software is not that valuable. But you still need to spend time, money, and energy building it. So, I contribute a lot of tools, frameworks and what not of which I am the main user. Just so I can continue to use that stuff on the next project.

codingdave 2y ago

This is not the first story I've heard of a product that isn't quite right, but when deciding where to pivot, fell into AI as the answer and then failed. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - when we figure out what AI is good at and what it is not, we will start treating it as a tool instead of a goal, and our product ideation will stabilize.

ltbarcly3 2y ago
Are you saying AI can't rescue a bad product idea by automating things? Like more efficiently doing something nobody wants done isn't a business?
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  My opinion: In software, the best use of AI is to create a do-what-I-mean UI. That is so-called AI (more to the point, use of LLMs and vision, speech, and audio processing) can allow new modes of interface that help a user operate the computer and achieve something that was nearly impossible with the user at the raw controls. This will not produce superior work to someone who knows what they're doing at the controls. A competent programmer doesn't need this. An excellent touch typist doesn't need this. But let's say someone who has a vague idea of what outcome they want, but an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms to get there, can get further with a do-what-I-mean UI.
  - stuartjohnson12 2y ago
    Probably true with a more nuanced definition of "knowing what you're doing". I'm pretty good at writing code, Cursor is faster.
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    As long as the consequences of then producing something which was not-quite-what-they-mean but them being unable to recognize that are not too high.
    - 2y ago

williamstein 2y ago

> “Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages.” This is something I could really use! Is there a product that does this and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

dgellow 2y ago
That's what we do at Stainless. By curiosity, what languages are you looking for?
ddorian43 2y ago
liblab.com All others are too expensive at ~250$/language/month (still less expensive than human developer).
ndimares 2y ago
Caveat that I work for Speakeasy, but there are a few tools you can look at: - Speakeasy - Fern - Stainless First SDK with Speakeasy is free and we also have discounts for companies who are just starting out. Feel free to shoot me an email if we can be useful: nolan@spakeasy.com :)
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  Typo in your email btw
  - ndimares 2y ago
    I'd like to say this was a clever ruse so that real people could reach me and bots wouldn't, but that'd be a lie. I just fat fingered it.
xnx 2y ago
https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator has 22K stars

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

Although the code dump could be interesting, this appears to have no license attached. Making it properly open source would make it a lot more useful.

mkl 2y ago
An MIT LICENSE file was added about an hour after your comment.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Fantastic, that's great:)

popalchemist 2y ago

I remember Konfig. Sorry you couldn't find fit, but great work nonetheless. About the code - would you be willing to add an MIT License? I don't see the code being used without a permissive license.

kaoD 2y ago
There's a LICENSE file. MIT in particular. https://github.com/konfig-dev/konfig/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/konfig-dev/konfig/blob/main/LICENSE
- popalchemist 2y ago
  Ah. It would show up in your repo's metadata if it were in the root directory.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

CodeWriter23 2y ago

Admiring your courage in dumping your repo raw and uncut.

mrbluecoat 2y ago
I agree, this was a really touching admission: > Looking back to March 2022 when I left my job to pursue this startup full-time, I have absolutely no regrets. I knew the risks—that failure was a very real possibility—but I also knew I had to take this chance. Today, even as we close this chapter, I'm grateful for the failure because it has taught me more than success ever could.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

asdev 2y ago

Thank you for sharing. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business." I think we are unfortunately going to see this outcome appear a lot in the near future as the AI bubble pops

zahlman 2y ago
Am I the only one who would respect the effort more if it had instead been written like so? >We then decided to try using generative AI in a vertical B2B SaaS product, believing we could solve previously unsolved problems this way. We came up with and pitched multiple ideas, but user feedback was never positive enough to give us confidence that we were on the right track to build a huge business. As is, my first impression is something like: "Jeez, whoever wrote this is firmly embedded in a niche fly-by-night culture that instinctively turns me off, and now can't psychologically shake free even immediately after crashing and burning".
shusaku 2y ago
Open sourcing your code and giving up is the ultimate pivot to AI - the new models will learn what you did and someday do it better (?).

gortok 2y ago

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business." How many wonderful niche products would be around if their owners had tried for a small business instead of a 'huge business' with 'hyper growth'?

ed 2y ago
There seems to be a subtext here of “see? I told you it was hard!” Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google instead of a Basecamp. They’re different kinds of company. If anything it’s easy to underestimate the risk of building a low-risk business. They’re all hard. Kudos to Konfig!
- bachmeier 2y ago
  > Nothing wrong with setting out to build a Google Sure there is. The probability of success is as good as zero. In all seriousness, a better business model is buying $1000 a month in lottery tickets. You have the same chance of success, you can do it on the side while working your job, and if you do hit the jackpot you don't have to do any additional work. This particular business has no path to being a Google but it might have a shot at being a Basecamp.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Your mental model of startups is a lottery? Even the Marxist analysis would say it’s about privilege, access, and exploitation. Not “probability”. Considering well connected people with startup know-how and experience in the Bay Area, I would say they do pretty well with serious startup projects.
    - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago

farceSpherule 2y ago

A product in search of a problem…

deadbabe 2y ago

Has there ever been a scenario where someone gave up on a startup, dumped the code, then someone picked it up and turned it into a successful business?

gkoberger 2y ago
This isn't exactly what you mentioned, but Josh Pigford gave up on his startup Maybe, shut down the company and open sourced it. It got incredibly popular on Github, so he started it up again. (https://maybefinance.com/ https://maybefinance.com/) A bigger example might be Mozilla. It was a closed-source browser (Netscape Navigator), and when it was dumped, some employees petitioned to open source it. And that's how we got Firefox.
reboothed 2y ago
Close but not quite (and keeping some parts intentionally vague): There was a data startup ran for ~3y until the 10 person team imploded in a tough market. Everyone left or was laid off, the office was closed, operations ceded etc. The website and some collection were still left running in zombie mode. A couple of years later, the non-technical founder and CEO (who at this point had bought everyone else out) saw demand and PMF emerging. Mostly through serendipity, I was one of 3 people brought in to "see what we can do with it", originally intended as a 3 month project. We came in with zero context and jumped right in to figuring out the ship we were now sailing. I was able to have one or two of conversation with the previous CTO but that was about it in terms of overlap. Things progressed and within a few months we found ourselves as co-founders of "Company v2.0". My partner took over as CEO. I left after 2y around our series A when we were 20~30 employees and arguably a leader in our market segment. At that point there were significant and crucial parts of the stack and codebase inherited (and evolved obv) from the original efforts by the previous team. The company is now an established brand, have offices in several countries and had a successful series B last year.
dboreham 2y ago
There are some legal risks with this. Having an OSS license from the copyright holder to use the code is not the same as being the copyright holder.

gkoberger 2y ago

Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things. Hacker News was always good to us, especially as I was more vulnerable. I'd love to hear more! I'm going to reach out privately :) Overall, though, congrats on all the work you put in. It's incredibly hard to start a company and believe in yourself, and you should be proud!

livearchivist 2y ago
This was super wholesome and made my day
k0ns0l 2y ago
:-)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anonu 2y ago
You might have been successful, compared to konfig, because it looks like you had an 8-year headstart. It could be that konfig was a fine idea and well executed, just not at the right time.
- gkoberger 2y ago
  Maybe, but there’s a number of companies in the SDK space that popped up the past 3 years and are seemingly successful. And there were a number of companies back when we started that are no longer around.
mdaniel 2y ago
Since you're here, I wanted to say that the css transition on readme's login has stuck with me as the strongest branding element I can recall. Kudos to whomever came up with that because it is just excellent

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

bwood 2y ago

As a customer of Konfig, I am super bummed about this. I think we may even have been their first customer (referenced in the init commit). Dylan and Anh-Tuan solved a number of real problems for us, and they did it spectacularly. They essentially provided a one-stop-shop for generated SDKs and beautiful hosted docs/tutorials that would call our API and immediately allow users to start playing with real data. Prior to Konfig, we were hand-writing a hodgepodge of SDKs to wrap our API and using ReadMe to host the docs (which never quite worked interactively with our API due to request signing that we require on our API). We're self-hosting the docs now thanks to Konfig open-sourcing it: https://docs.snaptrade.com/ https://docs.snaptrade.com/ Tons of respect for these guys and I wish they'd found a way to make it work. Also, for anyone finding themselves in a similar situation as Konfig (a product that (some? most? all?) customers love, but revenue not scaling as needed), please consider charging more. We probably would have paid 2-3x what Konfig was charging us and more as we grow, but they never asked and never built in any usage-based cost scaling (like $X/month/SDK, $Y/month/demo, etc).

gnuly 2y ago
I got to know about konfig from your product itself. The docs were(maybe still are?) so good that I had to check what was behind it. It really is better than swagger/redoc.
cess11 2y ago
Did you try to use https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator directly?
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  There are multiple open-source tools backed by large companies to do this. I use one of them for my sdks. So I can really understand how they could struggle to sell it, it's a hard sale to sell someone a commercial product that does pretty much the same as free open-source projects. I was tempted to check it out but as bad as it sounds even with it being open source and free I couldn't find a reason to spend the time over just using what I have now.

andrewstuart 2y ago

"I Failed". YOU didn't fail. Your business failed. It's an important distinction. You are not your business - for your mental health.

tugu77 2y ago
That catchy title is what brought it to the HN front page though.

jaza 2y ago

Good on you for open sourcing the code. Its destiny may yet be as a hidden gem that makes some peoples' lives better. In which case, not what I'd call a failure.

newusertoday 2y ago

from the bottom of my heart thank you @dylanhuang . Releasing it without modification gives us rare opportunity to inspect the codebase of actual startup that had paid customers. Its more valuable than polished/redacted versions.

Woshiwuja 2y ago

[dead]

tugu77 2y ago

Not every little idea, as useful as it might be, needs to turn into a hyper-growth business. Just make it an open source project on the side. If it gets popular then you get famous and hopefully some big company finds it so useful that they hire you and let you work on it full time. Konfig seems like a perfect example for this.

thecleaner 2y ago

Remarkable show of persistence. Honestly, I really like that the Repo is as-is. Congratulations on the journey, hope you learnt a ton. PS - you built some of your static content on Docusaurus, a Meta open source project. They're hiring like crazy. Maybe you get to work on that one.

simmo9000 2y ago

Well done having a go. Most don't. Publishing your results makes you part of history. Respect.

stunt 2y ago

He is young. At that age, I tried multiple times and failed each time. I did manage to sell one and it earned me good money. At that age you have plenty of time to pursue many things but you often lack the experience needed to succeed in the B2B market. You definitely need support from someone with sufficient B2B experience, or you might have better luck focusing on something in the B2C space. My only advice if he really wants to continue pursuing B2B is to find a partner who can sell the product. Selling is a full-time job on its own.

ianpurton 2y ago

The developer tools market is REALLY difficult. Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]". No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.

presentation 2y ago
That said most developers don’t have any awareness of problems outside of those they experience… which tend to be developer tooling issues. So you get a ton of companies building dev tools startups despite an incredible amount of need elsewhere. I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission. Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introduction of new unknowns/things-to-check adds enough uncertainty to make them uncomfortable. "The new thing always puts things here instead of there and it doesn't handle these cases. I miss the way we used to do things."
  - presentation 2y ago
    Yeah, finding the right people with enough mental flexibility but who understand the challenges of a different domain is rare but super valuable.
olavgg 2y ago
Not really true, but dealing with 50x 10 USD invoices is not something I want to waste time on. Is there a business that can bundle different services with just one invoice? Or do I still have to use AWS, Azure, GCloud?

block_dagger 2y ago

It takes a strong will to admit so publicly that you failed and to release unpolished code. I’m sure many will benefit from your efforts. Bravo.

Hendrikto 2y ago

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be huge. Businesses should focus more on sustainability, and not shut down after 2–3 years after pivoting three times.

herbturbo 2y ago
Thank VCs who only exist to find a unicorn to keep their LPs investing so they can charge their 2 and 20.
jf22 2y ago
I don't understand this criticism. Most businesses aren't hyperscale. Some businesses are hyperscale because that's what people want to invest in.
dagw 2y ago
American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd think of that has a big success. In the US they may very well think of that as failure, especially if they are VC funded. I remember hearing a SV VC straight up say that if you consider selling your company for $50 million a win, the you don't have the right mindset and he doesn't want to do business with you. If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize. And while this might be healthier for you as an individual, it's bad for the Economy.
- thisisabore 2y ago
  Yes, but SV VC are not known for being wise people you look to for life advice. It's a bit like asking for forest safety advice from drunk hunters.

mettamage 2y ago

Awesome, will be learning a lot from this. I feel this is much of an operational playbook as one could get.

mcnichol 2y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand kudos to them for the self-reflection, facing hard truths, and building a really wide set of tools. But when you look under the hood it's tooling that wraps tooling. The API categorization tool arguably hands off a large portion of the heavy lifting to OpenAI. "You are a world class categorizer. Fit these APIs into one of these groups." The rest of the file is just wiring and a little blurring of the lines of model, view, and controller. I saw some testing and was like, okay this is going to be important if you are wrapping a lot of tooling because "change outside of your control" but then it's just a the default contextLoads() functional test Intellij gives that makes sure dependencies exist and nothing fails at compile. I think the vision is there and it is definitely aligned to the Pareto principle but it feels like the idea was tested that markets aren't interested in maintaining their stuff while internally they haven't even addressed maintaining their own stuff. Feels like a Catch 22 where if they could address that reason for themselves first then they could probably solve that for other people. But addressing it means having a product that is being used in order to feel the pain and empathize with the end user.

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

yeah, "software developers" is notoriously one of the toughest markets

vkweb 2y ago

I would prefer to build a sustainable business and live a calm life. :D

vitro 2y ago

Well, with Latudio [1] a language learning app, we're 6 years in since the first line of code and we still haven't thrown in the towel even if we have little traction. But we still do those small little steps and hope they add up so we have a snowball big enough that it starts rolling by itself, perhaps, one day. In my mind, I also had a thought that we would rise and be huge, but I let go of that one. Instead, we just put one foot in front of the other and what warms my heart are those stories like when a person in Uganda got so confident thanks to our app that he opened his own language school. For this it makes sense to continue. What I want now is just to have a nice work/family balance and the app paying my bills and something extra. That would be a great start. [1] https://www.latudio.com https://www.latudio.com

sbochins 2y ago

“It’s refreshing to see a founder’s honest postmortem that doesn’t just blame ‘bad timing’ or ‘market conditions.’ Instead, he’s ripping off the Band-Aid and laying bare the pain points—no hype, no quiet pivot into mediocrity. It’s the kind of retrospective that should be required reading before your next ‘growth hack’ session: get the fundamentals right or prepare to pen your own ‘closing up shop’ blog post.”

Loxicon 2y ago

What is absolutely wild to me is how many developers build "developer focused tools". That is the red'est sea to swim in as a small dev because it's easy to build things you can use every day. I have a lot of friends who build tools in book shops, martech, payments and other niches. There are so many markets people. Most of them are unknown, and therefore, low comp.