[HN Gopher] Lessons from a Startup Pivot
___________________________________________________________________
Lessons from a Startup Pivot
Author : icey
Score : 20 points
Date : 2022-07-25 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (haacked.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (haacked.com)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Can you talk a little more in detail about your tech stack?
| Perhaps it would help more readers like me who are curious given
| your history in the .NET space.
| haacked wrote:
| Sure! Because of my background in .NET, it made sense to stick
| with what I know. I don't believe the tech stack makes or
| breaks a product (unless you choose egregiously poorly). A
| product's success is primarily determined by how well you hit
| product market fit.
|
| That being said, a good stack that you know well can affect how
| quickly you build and how quickly you can adapt the product to
| changing market conditions.
|
| So here's what we use:
|
| - _ASP.NET CORE( - Primarily ASP.NET Razor Pages for the web
| app. ASP.NET MVC Controllers for the internal and external APIs
| we support.
|
| - C# - We try to stay on the latest version. The recent pattern
| matching improvements alone make our code so much cleaner.
|
| - _[HTMX](https://htmx.org/)\* - for front-end. We're not at
| the point where we feel we need a heavyweight front-end
| framework like React. We like the 37signals approach of
| shipping "HTML over the wire". We're also big on Web
| Components. That's a result of our [GitHub
| heritage](https://github.blog/2021-05-04-how-we-use-web-
| components-at-...).
|
| - _TypeScript_ - for our front-end JS. This is a recent
| addition. Most of our JS is still ES6.
|
| - _Azure Database for PostgreSql_ - PostgreSql is rock solid
| and great for storing all kinds of data.
|
| - _Azure Functions_ - we support three types of custom code
| skills that customers can use to enhance and customize the bot
| : JavaScript, C#, and Python. We run these in Azure Functions.
|
| - _App Insights_ - We use this for logging.
|
| - _Azure Managed Grafana_ - We have a nice Grafana dashboard
| based off our App Insights logs that helps us get a birds-eye
| view of how everything is doing.
|
| - _Azure App Configuration_ - For feature flags.
|
| As you can see, it's pretty heavily Microsoft based. Part of
| that is my background. The other part is we got a lot of Azure
| Credits when we joined the [Microsoft for
| Startups](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups?rtc=1)
| program. So it made fiscal sense for us to stick with Azure.
|
| I do like that we can manage everything in a single portal. But
| some of these tools are not best-in-breed as we will be looking
| at other options down the road.
| gumby wrote:
| > Lesson: Start with selling a Product not a Platform
|
| Good advice. People rarely want a platform, especially from a new
| entrant. They want an aspirin tablet.
|
| Once they are hooked you can expand.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I remember VCs telling me to be a platform, not a product.
| "Look at what FB is doing!" It made sense for FB, but that
| doesn't mean it makes sense for everyone.
|
| A sticky platform will be stickier than a sticky product. But
| that doesn't mean every product should be made into a platform.
| haacked wrote:
| Exactly. We still think the underlying platform has value, but
| we have to prove the product first. Then maybe later we can
| also sell the platform.
| haacked wrote:
| Hey! I'm the author of this blog post. If you have any questions,
| let me know!
|
| One of the lessons I omitted (because the post was getting a bit
| long), is we started off as cross-platform (Slack, Teams, and
| Discord) but in the end we decided to focus on a single product.
|
| In retrospect, we've struggled to decide if that's a lesson to
| learn. Should we have started with a single platform? It
| certainly makes it much faster to build for a single platform.
| But at the time, we really thought the cross-platform chat-ops
| would be a distinguishing trait!
|
| Anyways, I hope you enjoy the post!
| wizwit999 wrote:
| direct thoughts:
|
| > Balance your early engineering and infrastructure with
| achieving Product Market Fit
|
| No, not really, you should focus way more on the latter really.
| We devs love the first tho. e.g. comment from your original post
| 12mo ago: "Super stoked to see you launching after working on it
| for so long!" -> how much of the code you've written was
| necessary to come to the realization you eventually came to?
| Based on the way you described your trouble selling, seems like
| very little to none.
|
| - Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity lolwut)
|
| - corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you worked.
| Seems like your original idea was heavily based on something u
| saw internally. Just because something works well at one (usually
| large) company you worked at doesn't mean it serves a widespread
| market need (I've been burned by this).
|
| Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!
| haacked wrote:
| > No, not really, you should focus way more on the latter
| really.
|
| You're absolutely right. I think I should have phrased this as
| "Don't completely neglect your early engineering and
| infrastructure." Some choices could inhibit our ability to
| achieve product market fit.
|
| > - Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity
| lolwut)
|
| I think the pandemic created supply chain problems that
| affected a lot of companies. There's a lot of reasons to like
| Azure for me. I'm familiar with it. They focus a lot on
| developer experience. But this one issue really hit hard and
| definitely makes me want to be more flexible in how we deploy
| to the cloud.
|
| > - corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you
| worked.
|
| Ha! Yeah, we really loved the GitHub way of working. Turns out,
| GitHub had a unique culture and it doesn't necessarily
| translate over to whole market. I wish I had included this in
| the post.
|
| > Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!
|
| Much appreciated!
| GhouseMohiddin wrote:
| Great article and very informative..!!
| haack79 wrote:
| Great article and super informative, hoping it takes off as it
| should !
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-25 23:01 UTC)