
RethinkDB: why we failed - kiyanwang
http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html
======
heyts
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608)

------
runT1ME
I really wonder how much of it was timing. Startups with very little to lose
aren't going to pay for support contracts on open source software. That takes
established companies with SLAs, or quantified dollars lost per minute of
downtime, or companies that just can't hire fast enough and too much work to
do to bother with investigating DB issues.

But these companies that would pay aren't going to roll out new products on a
database only a few folks have heard of.

Let's suppose in an alternate universe Slava had made Rethink his hobby
project and it had taken ten years to get to where it is today. Even then,
companies that had taken a gamble on it may _still_ be a few years out from
where the survivors can (and it would make economic sense to) buy a support
contract, but their runway would have potentially carried them into the sweet
spot of having early adopters become paying customers.

------
webmaven
_> Many people have very strong feelings about the developer tools market.
Engineers love building developer tools, so they badly want developer tools
companies to thrive._

 _> I am hesitant to dismiss the market entirely – partly because I don’t want
to generalize from a single experience, partly because I don’t like saying “it
cannot be done”, and partly because there are quite a few exceptions. GitHub,
MongoDB, and Docker have built formidable companies. GitLab and Unity seem to
be doing well._

I think the mentioned examples are less developer _tools_ companies than
developer _services_ companies.

------
rebelidealist
I get that they are saying the cloud offering is hard, but if they didn't have
that, what was their business model? Were they relying on support and
consulting fees? Consulting is hard to scale.

Cloud offering with build-in redundancy (herokudb, RDS, Redis Cloud) is what
most app stakeholders are looking for. We want to try RethinkDb but we don't
want to deal with servers.

If rethinkdb is good, i hope someone can resurrect this as a cloud service.

~~~
justinclift
AWS would be kind of ironic. ;)

------
strongai
Back in 1996, having just joined a developer tools company, I recall my new
CEO at our first meeting saying "The developer tools market is such a shitty,
shitty market"

