[danielsiders]

Interesting question. I think there are two angles:

1. Having already shut down and the team gone separate ways and onto new projects how much would you need to get back on the horse so to speak

2. Are there still things you want to accomplish and what would it take to make them succeed

Personally I’d happily take a check to do more development. There are a lot of Flynn 2.0 features that were in various stages of completion, if someone was willing to fund development to complete them up front that’s great.

However I wouldn’t want to do sales for this/run a b2b company around this again.

So if one of the companies that was using Flynn called and said they wanted to pay our development team to keep building, that’s great. But if a VC called and said “wait! Let’s finally make this company take off” there would have to be a decent sized bonus check attached. Mostly that’s just because after years on a ramen profitable startup as a founder your finances aren’t awesome so saying “yes” means turning down higher paying offers.

The biggest problem we had financially was being able to develop features before our customers needed them. We knew what to build but didn’t have enough budget to ship them. Any offer would have to come with the guarantee that we could focus on development for day 6 months before starting sales back up.

At the end of the day there’s work we left unfinished and if someone was willing to fund that in advance I’d generally be up for it. But if someone just wanted to keep the business wheels turning that’s not super attractive at this point, so it would need to be a https://levels.fyi salary rather than a startup founder salary.

[forgotmypw17]

Thank you for providing such a detailed answer.

You've gifted a lot of insight.

If you don't mind me asking, what are some features you think are most desirable for you to develop, and what would be your time budget for developing them, if it is more than 6 months?

And which title from levels.fyi do you think is most applicable to the person or people who would be working on that feature?

[danielsiders]

Happy to — it’s a great question! I want all software to be open source but we really haven’t figured out how to fund many types of open source projects yet.

- Database appliances (RDS) for major DBs

- turnkey security, especially for compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, ISO 27001)

- close the loop on development environments (vscode)

- CICD

That’s pretty close to our series A roadmap. Mythical man months aside, I’d say all of that could be production-ready in around 18 months with a few engineers per bullet point.

In terms of salaries it’s a little tricky for a number of reasons (people are willing to work for less for a startup and/or on open source plus we hired around the world), but for many of the developers I’d say equivalent to L4-5.

The important thing to remember about PaaS is multi-node vs single node are different worlds. There are great tools like dokku that were designed only for single node operation, then there are things like Flynn or k8 for many nodes. As soon as you’re doing many nodes you’re in distributed systems territory where engineers have to manage much more complete systems design and as a result are more expensive and in more demand. That’s not saying anything bad about simpler tools, they’re great and important, it’s just a lot harder to design around distributed systems where failure modes, consensus, partitions, etc are a lot more complicated. A lot of the challenges when we started were figuring out what the problems were and how to solve them rather than implementation time. In the last 5 years there has been a lot more written so less research would be needed to implement some of these today.

Our overall goal was to automate anything in the devops lifecycle that could be automated, so that’s a never ending process. Unfortunately it means that the more you scale the more technology you have to make, so Flynn for smaller companies with fewer users is less expensive to design and build than Flynn for huge companies with lots of traffic. (Again, distributed systems are hard) so knowing the scale of your prospective users is a big part of the cost equation.

[forgotmypw17]

For me as a totally uninitiated, the database appliances sounds like the lowest hanging fruit with the fewest unknown unknowns and the biggest payoff, is that correct?

At what you described, for 6 months, that's about 200K USD per dev, so it would cost about 600K USD to develop the database appliances "superfeature"?

Do you think this is a realistic figure? And how realistic do you think it is to get that much money together from all the users?

[danielsiders]

It’s not too far off. Here’s how I’d look at it:

$180k base salary is appropriate but most of those people are expecting stock options as well (compare to Levels) so the fully loaded price* is closer to 300-500k/year x 3 people, so $1-1.5mm

We’ve already done most of the conceptual and architectural work for Postgres, MySQL, and mongo (and redis but not highly available). Much of that was inspired by the Manatee project at Joyent. So (though I haven’t looked at this I a while and the DBs may have changed in a way that becomes more challenging) this is probably a case of put money in, get value out.

However I can assure you you aren’t going to get even 600k out of the community.

We worked really hard to get the first 120k and twisted a lot of wrists to get there. (Of course if you know someone who wants to write 600k checks for open source stuff please have them call me)

The 1-1.5mm number is about what a standard YC company gets at demo day. So that’s the path I’d recommend. Add in another 500k for overhead and biz dev people and that’s a pretty solid startup. Honestly if we had just focused on that we would probably have got a series A.

One of the great things about open source is that you create 100x+ the amount of value that you capture. The dark side is that no one wants to contribute cash as users to make that happen (I’m thinking more of companies than individuals - lots of individuals will give a few dollars)

So, unfortunately, and as always, it’s easier to raise VC than sponsorships for open source.

That being said I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested to pick up where we left off. Either as a community project or a funded startup this would be a huge benefit to the ecosystem.

* of course you can find people who are cheaper and passionate about the project to do it for less, maybe much less. But if someone called me and said for what price can you guarantee this could be done, I’d say 1-1.5mm USD.

[forgotmypw17]

I was basing my estimate on a 6 month run.

Thank you very much once again for responding with this level of detail.

When you got the first 120k, who paid that? One entity or multiple?

[danielsiders]

Cool. We got the first 120k from I think around 12 companies. It followed close to a power law distribution, very long tail.

Our strategy was to encourage developers to talk to their bosses rather than contribute individually which we think but can’t prove worked well. Basically we tried to get on calls with CTOs and CEOs and explain that this would help the company.