| I agree, let me take a stab at starting the conversation. First of all, huge respect to Slava for this writeup. Having your startup fail is hard and it is not the time you want to blog about it. RethinkDB going broke was a sad thing to see for me, I can't imagine how it felt for him. I think the analysis of the two root causes (hard market, focus on the wrong metrics) is accurate. It is very sad to see that in the end correctness doesn't win the day, not even for databases. Since I run a startup too I can't help but apply his criteria to GitLab. Good metrics to focus on: 1. Timely arrival => we try to ship great features every month on the 22nd, something that both our users https://twitter.com/PragTob/statuses/767777202045915136 and the parody account likely run by our competitors employees agree on https://twitter.com/gitlabceohere/status/768440048802947073 2. Palpable speed => we're doing OK on self hosted, really bad on GitLab.com (fixes are in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 ). If you look beyond latency but to workflow we're doing great in integrating various parts of the process https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/14/idea-to-production/ 3. A use case => we're making GitLab an integrated tool with a broad scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope A good way to develop software from idea to production. I hope the above list doesn't come across as pretentious. I welcome pushback and the opportunity to talk more about the OP. I think the OP premise that it is hard to make money in the cloud is accurate. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make GitLab.com run and revenue takes a long time to grow. Selling on-premises software products has higher margins than a service. BTW I appreciate the shoutout to GitLab as one of the five exceptions that are doing well in the open source developer market. |