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I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I

I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth. Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

outlore 11mo ago
My apologies for sounding bitter. You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos. I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
- samlambert 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - prussia 11mo ago
    > if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that? Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.
  - mping 11mo ago
    Jesus dude,just say it was a mistake to call it free forever. How can you be a founder or whatever, have a product and not expect people to judge the words your website had, or the words you say? You should know it comes with the territory. Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.
    - dardeaup 11mo ago
      He's horribly blind to this. His arrogance and ego prevent him from doing the right thing.
- bruce511 11mo ago
  If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out. Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary. For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits. Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone. Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time. Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways. It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
  - samlambert 11mo ago
    I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
    - deaux 11mo ago
      > I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now? I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have. Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
- AYBABTME 11mo ago
  People over profit in this case would have been cowardice, not courage. Some had to lose their job for others to keep theirs and for the product to continue serving their customers. Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result? Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs. FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.
trial3 11mo ago
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
- LambdaComplex 11mo ago
  Yeah, $5 databases is something that maybe I would actually use for some hobby projects, but that one sentence just killed any interest that I had in ever giving this company my money.
  - dardeaup 11mo ago
    Same! Unreal that he keeps digging the whole deeper and deeper. Apparently, he doesn't know how to either keep his mouth shut or humble himself to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness to those they burned by saying 'free forever'.
cowthulhu 11mo ago
Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.
infrawhispers 11mo ago
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care... This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image. Please, try to apologize to them if possible I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :) This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really. Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that. I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it. Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet. I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible. I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
overfeed 11mo ago
> people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth. Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place? > Either way I don't care what you remember or think. It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned. Rug-pulls. Not even once.
zzmbnp 11mo ago
"Either way I don't care what you remember or think." Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off. Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
tw04 11mo ago
I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future. I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
Gathering6678 11mo ago
I honestly don't even know about your company before and the only thing I remember now about PlanetScale is the CEO telling HN readers to f off...

outlore 11mo ago

My apologies for sounding bitter. You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos. I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all

samlambert 11mo ago
[flagged]
- prussia 11mo ago
  > if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that? Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.
- mping 11mo ago
  Jesus dude,just say it was a mistake to call it free forever. How can you be a founder or whatever, have a product and not expect people to judge the words your website had, or the words you say? You should know it comes with the territory. Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.
  - dardeaup 11mo ago
    He's horribly blind to this. His arrogance and ego prevent him from doing the right thing.
bruce511 11mo ago
If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out. Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary. For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits. Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone. Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time. Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways. It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
- samlambert 11mo ago
  I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
  - deaux 11mo ago
    > I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now? I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have. Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
AYBABTME 11mo ago
People over profit in this case would have been cowardice, not courage. Some had to lose their job for others to keep theirs and for the product to continue serving their customers. Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result? Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs. FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.

trial3 11mo ago

> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for

LambdaComplex 11mo ago
Yeah, $5 databases is something that maybe I would actually use for some hobby projects, but that one sentence just killed any interest that I had in ever giving this company my money.
- dardeaup 11mo ago
  Same! Unreal that he keeps digging the whole deeper and deeper. Apparently, he doesn't know how to either keep his mouth shut or humble himself to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness to those they burned by saying 'free forever'.

cowthulhu 11mo ago

Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.

infrawhispers 11mo ago

> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago

> Either way I don't care what you remember or think. If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care... This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image. Please, try to apologize to them if possible I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :) This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really. Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that. I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it. Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet. I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible. I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really

overfeed 11mo ago

> people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth. Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place? > Either way I don't care what you remember or think. It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned. Rug-pulls. Not even once.

zzmbnp 11mo ago

"Either way I don't care what you remember or think." Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off. Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.

tw04 11mo ago

I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future. I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.

Gathering6678 11mo ago

I honestly don't even know about your company before and the only thing I remember now about PlanetScale is the CEO telling HN readers to f off...