
Our Odd Startup: 3½ Guys, No VC, Profitability, and Patience - sds111
https://www.indiehackers.com/@thefln/our-odd-startup-3-guys-no-vc-profitability-and-patience-8f3ae206de
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onion2k
_Sure, there are now dozens of e-commerce solutions similar to Snipcart. Yet
there is 0 business like ours._

It sounds like Snipcart are doing something very similar to Moltin
([https://moltin.com](https://moltin.com)), which is a YC company.

~~~
tehwebguy
My implementation of this was rejected in 2013.

I should have put more work into my YC app + video!

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zer0livemagic
I'd agree that the fascination with VC money is not helpful. There are
certainly verticals where you can only survive with outside investments
(biotech comes to mind) or where scaling quickly is important, but no amount
of money will save you if you don't have product-market fit.

~~~
anovikov
Well, a good half of the ecosystem is tailored to eat away investor money and
nothing else.

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5_minutes
Headline might be over the top but the essence here is a nice vibe.

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wordpressdev
Being a solopreneur, I am a one man startup.

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a_imho
I like the takeaways, but the no VC seems to be quite an exaggeration.

 _They invested temporary resources (design, frontend) and a full-time salary
(mine) into Snipcart, our developer-first e-commerce platform._

~~~
jacquesm
That's not venture capital, that's a bit of boost at the front, and most of it
not in money. They didn't say they self-financed all of it, just that they did
not take on any venture capital.

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weego
OK so it's not VC in the narrowest of definitions, but there was capital
investment by a third party so there are some language gymnastics involved to
overstate the independent nature of the company.

~~~
jacquesm
There is nothing narrow about that definition, rather, you are trying to
stretch what it means to take on venture capital to things it was never
intended to cover.

The language gymnastics are entirely on your part.

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ojr
So it is 4 guys not 3 1/2 just because you don't work full time doesnt me
youre 1/2 a person?

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Sylos
Right, but then why would you click on that headline?

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ojr
I clicked to figure out why a person was described as a half person but I
didn't spend much time on the page and didn't figure it out, do you want to
know what I ate for lunch too?

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graycat
My Odd Startup!

One guy, no VC, patience, problem identified, for solution, crucial secret
sauce found and scalable, production quality code written, alpha test in
progress, meager burn rate, no users or revenue yet.

Problem? One where the first good solution should be a "must have" for nearly
everyone on the Internet.

Solution? An excellent solution now with a high technological barrier to entry
and later with some strong network effects.

Solution appears to the users as just a simple Web site that looks good on
everything with a Web browser up to date as of maybe 10 years ago and from
just 24,000 programming language statements.

Platform? Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.0 with ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Visual Basic
.NET, and a little use of C via _platform invoke_.

Potential? If people like the solution, then in line to be the first company
worth $1T.

~~~
radicalbyte
Why on earth would you use VB.Net for something new?

~~~
rsynnott
I didn’t know it was even a thing; haven’t heard anything about it in around
ten years.

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graycat
Visual Basic .NET is not much like the Visual Basic of 10 years ago.

As far as I can tell, Visual Basic .NET is now essentially as powerful as C#
or any other Microsoft language on Windows.

Supposedly C# has lambda expressions. Okay. If I need those, maybe I'll write
some C#. But have VB.NET call or be called by C# is relatively easy. So, I
could have a function in C# called by my main code in VB.NET.

I wrote enough C to understand it fairly well, at least at the level in K&R.
I've looked at some C# code, and it seems to read easily enough. Maybe I could
be writing C# in a few days. If I want to convert to C#, I understand that
there is a translator to do that for me.

I do like the more traditional syntax of VB.NET instead of the deliberately
"idiosyncratic" syntax of C borrowed by C#. So, I see no biggie reason not to
use the syntax I prefer in VB.NET.

I learned programming long before C++ or even C. I skipped C++ -- never wrote
a line of it. My first code with objects was essentially VB.NET. The objects
are easy enough, close enough to what I did with structures in PL/I. Now with
.NET, VB.NET, and C#, there's reduced reason to write C++ on Windows. There
are plenty of serious criticisms of C++ for important production software.
Yup, it's possible to write good code for big projects in C++, but just from
memory management I'll let VB.NET handle that for me.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
Good luck with your project! This was a fun read. Don't let the haters keep
you down, just remember Zuckerberg shipped Facebook in PHP.

~~~
graycat
Actually, my code is solid. Visual Basic .NET is a fully solid language for
high end production software. It's not the old Visual Basic 6.0 which
supposedly was mostly a toy.

I never used the 6.0 thing but learned VB.NET right away for my present
project.

On Windows, there's nothing more solid for high end software. E.g., my Web
page programming is the ASP.NET part of .NET. The SQL Server programming is
via the ADO.NET part.

There's nothing in my production code like PHP, Python, Lisp, etc.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
My philosophy is always choose the right tool for the right job.

If you're productive in VB.NET and can ship your MVP with it, it doesn't
matter what people think about your choice of framework/language.

I got it a lot when I decided to write my backend in Go. The meme is "Go is
for shitty programmers, no generics, etc" but my system doesn't bottom out at
1K QPS. I feel like the people who get into heated debates about language
choice should spend more time _coding_ then arguing about which language is
the best.

~~~
graycat
My code is much better than an MVP. Instead what I have does essentially all I
have in mind for the users now; other features I have in mind stand to be
minor and only for the future. And the code I have now should be about as
solid as code nearly any production code is. It's good code; nothing wrong
with it. On the way to $1T the code should have some additional features for
system monitoring and management, but such features would be useless now. And
there should be some redesign efforts for scaling to 1000s of times more Web
pages per second, that is, a lot of parallelism and graceful handling of
parallel components currently not working (can't expect that all parts of a
server farm with 1 million square feet of space and full of racks will all be
working all the time). But such parallel considerations are for the future.
Besides, Microsoft runs some really big server farms, so I'm sure that when
I'm a customer for several thousand licenses for Windows Server and SQL
Server, their system monitoring, automated deployment, etc., I'll be able to
get some high end Microsoft consulting on how to use their products for such
computing.

Yes, there have been language wars for decades. They never made much sense and
still don't.

Here is a resolution for my work now: The first choice is between Microsoft
and Linux. Clearly it's possible to be successful with either of them. Like a
lot of large sites, I picked Microsoft.

On Microsoft the main language choices were between VB.NET (the newer one, not
the old Visual Basic 6.0) and C#. Between those two, for production code,
about the only difference is just syntactic sugar. I just happen to prefer the
flavor of that sugar in VB.NET. Then, for writing production code, VB.NET is
essentially as good as C# or anything else on Windows. For the current state
of computing, there's NOTHING wrong with the choice of VB.NET for high end
production software.

More generally, so far there's no big magic in programming language deign;
essentially all the ideas are 20+ years old, sometimes 40+ years old, e.g.,
for capabilities and access control lists, security rings, software handling
of interrupts, back to Multics and PL/I in the 1960s. Heck for HN, IIRC Lisp
goes back to 1959 or so. Concurrency? Dijkstra semaphores are not much used.
What does get used is still simple. Sure, buried in SQL Server might be some
really nice and tricky concurrency work, but only programmers specializing in
SQL internals see that stuff. For algorithms and data structures, still AVL
trees or red-black remain about the most advanced used. For just k-D trees,
they are obscure enough that they get used only in rare special situations.
For concurrency versions of some of the common algorithms, those, too, are
rarely used and for narrow special situations. Sure, there's a version of the
heap data structure that gives better locality of reference when using virtual
memory, but, again, that need is rare.

The good news is how powerful the usual stuff, e.g., just VB.NET, actually is.
We shouldn't neglect the good stuff right in front of us when, as usual, it is
plenty powerful enough for the work to be done.

The main control structures remain if-then-else, do-while, and call-return.
Co-routines? Not much used. Even scope of names as in PL/I has been cut back
to the simplistic approach of just C. The super nice structure addressing in
PL/I (we're talking 1960s here) has been replaced with the too heavy use of
pointers (by the compiler) required by objects. The PL/I structures were
nearly as useful as objects and much faster in the addressing. Net, in
programming language design for production code, there's isn't a lot that's
new and really important. So, really, in practice, just VB.NET is about as
good as it gets.

