One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding | Hacker News Reader

One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding

datastation.multiprocess.io

589 pointsrevorad117 comments

Advice regarding VCs: Don't ever talk to them if they randomly approach you saying they "really like what you're doing". They will gladly sent an associate to talk with you about your business in the greatest detail and ask you to share presentations, demos and metrics. Anything you give them will then get passed along to their own portfolio companies in your space. So don't feel flattered when they feign interest in your company, they're mostly just doing reconnaissance. Ignore it as chances are you're feeding them information they'll use to kill your company.

If you're really interested in VC funding you should proactively approach VCs (ideally using introductions by your network) that seem suitable. And you should check beforehand that they don't fund your main competitor.

Had this happen (random outreach). Led to a series A.

Respectfully disagree - I don't think competitors copying is a significant risk early on, compared to running out of money whilst trying to hit product market fit.

Fair point, maybe I formulated that a bit drastically, though I have seen this kind of reconnaissance increase quite a bit recently, so maybe I'm just fed up with it.

based on your anecdote against hundreds of thousands of founders getting spied on. I've seen it happen.

Basically if somebody wants to invest ask them: $ and t+

If they try to dodge or make up excuses, MOVE ON. IF they say if you give me A,B,C and then we can invest, ask them to put them in writing and put an exit fee. If they do not invest, they give you 1% of the proposed amount.

Somebody who is serious and has the balls won't waste time. Unfortunately rare.

I've wasted a two years of my youth because a VC on HN reached out to me, who ultimately just used my product/coding services.

Any dumb fuck can be a VC if they can raise cheap capital. Remember, there is very small group of VCs that know what they are doing. The rest are just in the game to spray and see what sticks on the wall (most of them do not make it during a downturn)

While both are anecdotes, I think the original warning is the more important one as it's not the one new founders will expect to encounter. Nothing wrong with taking the call, but be aware of the risks and do a bit of homework before you share anything mission critical.

It's hard to draw conclusions one way or another because there are so many variables. A good heuristic is that if you aren't speaking with a partner, your risk of having your time wasted (at best) is far higher.

I think this is an overly dire warning, but the core of it is correct. If you get a random reach out, it probably means a discussion with an associate who is building out their network/pipeline and doesn't have much, if any, sway within the company yet.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to meet with an associate, and doesn't mean they are seeking to kill your company. An intro meeting with an associate will take time you could be spending elsewhere, so it's up to you to determine if it's a good use of it.

I'll agree with both of the peer comments.

Had a random contact and ended up securing funding.

Had hundreds of random contacts with junior VCs who were just fishing and looking to fill their calendar.

Nowadays I just decline these meetings as they are quite boring after the 10th time and have a low hit rate.

Or better, tell them all the ideas that you've had that seemed great, but just cost you thousands of hours of pain before you found out why they were unworkable.

The markets are huge (I dare to say endless). Nobody is getting killed.

If intel in your company will kill your business you don’t have a defensible business.

This may be true after a certain point, but is certainly NOT the case when you're just getting started.

Basically no one has a defensible business prior to a funding round (or decent cash flow).

Your advice is correct, but the reason is wrong. If you want to raise money, then inbound VC interest is a great source of leads (led to out series A, similar to sibling comments).

But VCs employ armies of people to trawl the internet for new companies, and as an early stage founder you are time poor. Tell them that you are focusing on building right now but would love to chat when the time is right, add them to a spreadsheet, and go back to work.

The time to start taking calls is when you are actually ready to raise a pre-seed/seed, or ~6-12 months out from your series A (by this point you should have a team who can keep building while you are networking).

Also as the author noticed, treat the VC calls like a phone screen, and ask questions to filter out bad matches. If they don’t lead rounds at your current stage, or don’t “get” your product or market, move on.

Great advice on parent and this one.

If ever founder followed this advice, there would be a revolution in the funding landscape.

What's stopping you from asking them to sign an NDA before disclosing any details of what you are doing?

How are you going to know they betrayed you?

If you know, how are you going to prove it?

If you can prove it, how are you going to litigate it?

NDAs only real usefulness is for big players to legally bribe and contain small fry.

They literally won't sign an NDA, especially at that early of a stage.

Why not?

cause that’s the way the world works

Because your ideas might not be unique at all but signing an NDA will expose them to litigation if they launch or fund a competitor.

Asking for an NDA from an early stage VC is likely to actively hurt as it can make you seem inexperienced in the realm of startups/venture capital. A decent amount has been written on this. Here's a couple examples, but there are others: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html https://feld.com/archives/2006/02/why-most-vcs-dont-sign-nda...

Yup. In general anytime someone is approaching you, unless you are specifically seeking their services out, its probably for their benefit and not yours.

A VC seems impressive but they are just another company trying to make money. It's the founder version of getting LinkedIn Recruiter Spam.

> A VC seems impressive

Err... why?

*to a lot of people who have never interacted with vcs before

It feels like a stamp of approval even though its mostly meaningless. Like getting recruiter spam from a fang company. It feels like you must be doing something right or its a sign you are a good X. In reality it just means you're in someones marketing/outreach funnel.

Brain rape is definitely a real thing:

https://youtu.be/JlwwVuSUUfc

People with money don’t usually know where to put it but can buy the time of many people in their 20s to roll the dice with their time.

It can be a mutually productive relationship if eyes are wide open.

If it’s one way it can be tough.

Mentors/Investors have always said to me to seek investors (or individuals who care about you and your mission (before being part of a VC portfolio) and can help you navigate a world that is going to be foreign.

VC portfolios are focused on their return or outcome in a specific timeline. Decisions may need to be made as a result that might be the wrong ones because of that pressure and not enough insight from the market. Still it can be positive and productive in a healthy relationship.

I think you're overestimating how effective gossip is. Because that's what it is, when I chat with a VC and they're telling me something about another company they talked to.

It's great gossip, don't get me wrong. It can even sway decisions. But a fifteen minute call between two people about another call one of them had isn't really the tell-all people might think.

At best I learn that so-and-so is using this tool, or spending money with this vendor, or do such-and-such process in-house. If gossip about another company convinces an executive to make big moves, the gossip was a very small part of that energy.

>But a fifteen minute call between two people about another call one of them had isn't really the tell-all people might think.

You can also just promote your business without disclosing your secret sauce. If you can't handle a meeting with a VC without accidentally handing over company secrets, you've got bigger problems.

Founders are excited to talk about their business, and like with any skill it takes practice to learn what and how to share.

But isn't the conventional startup wisdom "Don't worry about people stealing your idea, if your idea is any good you'll have to shove it down people's throats"?

If your idea can be so easily stolen, no one will want it because others can also steal it. Also, someone has probably thought of it and tried it. Also, it probably means your vision not ambitious enough to be a unicorn, and you would have better spent your time climbing a corporate ladder.

That said, there's wisdom in not assuming that VCs want your company to succeed, even if you get funded by them.

Its not sharing your idea thats the problem, its sharing your data, implementation plan, research results, which features are getting traction, etc.

If you believe in the product/service that you're creating, should you worry about someone else building it more effectively?

(self-response: maybe, if they're going to cut corners in some areas to provide a more popular but somehow value-compromised alternative)

Thanks for this writeup, I can relate 100%, especially the part on the supportive spouse. I've built WunderGraph (https://wundergraph.com/) as a solo-dev for multiple years until I reached a similar point like you. It's weird to say, but my wife kind of accepted that I'd work on weekends between 1-3 pm when the kids sleep. What helped me get out of this "solo-time-drain-thing" was to find the right Co-Founders to help me. I've found a really nice guy to help me with Marketing, and another one who helped me develop the Product. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, find a team." I hope you can find some way of financing so that you can push through this wall. For me, it was working a full time job and building WunderGraph at night and on the weekends, but it's making you age quickly. I wish you the best for your future.

Where did you find your co-founders?

The marketing guy, I found on YC Startup School Co-Founder Match (https://www.startupschool.org/), the Developer was creating GraphQL Open Source projects that were related to what I was building, so I've got in touch with them.

I can definitely recommend Startup School, it helped me build a lot of useful connections.

How did you determine how to split equity?

Edit: I'm not looking for actual %s, just the factors involved.

Would like to know as well. This is tricky, as all your assets are probably intellectual property and hard to put a price tag on. Also some people have a hard time accepting that they are eligible for a smaller piece of the cake than you are.

Random thought on this: I do not personally believe the owner of the idea is worth more than 10% of equity. They have to be contributing something to get more. It may be capital, it may be sales but it has to be something.

I dream to start a company where I am able to steer almost every decision and the company shares automatically reduce my ownership over X years until a kind of coop forms and most employees have enough equity as a group to control the company. Give away control to put the right incentives on hiring. Also none of this 1 year cliff vesting nonsense. If you are willing to join a startup I am willing to give you equity immediately.

>none of this 1 year cliff vesting nonsense

It is foolish to give immediate equity to a new hire who hasn't proven themselves as a good worker and good fit.

And they do not have to be there for a long time to start providing immense value.

Totally agree, feels really naive.

You know you've got the right equity split when everybody thinks it's fair and the team can focus 100% on execution. Factors can be time spent on the project, experience, who "owns" what, connections, etc... But in the end, if you have to discuss this topic too much with someone, you know it's not going to work. If the Co-Founders cannot easily come to the same result, their mindset doesn't align well enough, which can be a risk for the whole operation. So, I'd advise against haggling too much, for both sides. Also, I'd suggest to discuss this topic very early on. Don't waste time if you don't know their expectations are in the same ballpark as yours. If you get the right people to commit helping you, I'd rather give them more equity, when the other option is to keep doing this on my own forever. Ideally, you can all "start" at the same time and split equity equally, but the reality is that you don't have all the stars aligned on day one.

a cofounder and I used this system for a previous company: https://slicingpie.com/ It worked pretty well for us, but we were also pretty well tuned to each others expectations in advance.

> working a full time job and building WunderGraph at night and on the weekends

this is actually a terrible advice, although i'm glad it worked out for you!

this type of side-hustling can quickly turn into losing your startup or your job (or both)

better approach is to save some money, leave for a year and become profitable from day 1

profitability will decrease your chances of failure dramatically

I actually lost my job. I'd also advise against replicating what I did, but it was my only option really. I'm not born rich, single income dad, paying off the house. I wasn't able to afford to "leave for a year". It's also a timing thing. The right time to do WunderGraph is now, not in two years. So I had to decide to give up a dream or work through this and risk my job. Luckily, I've found the right people to help me and first customers at exactly the right time. But trust me, WunderGraph was at tables-takes for a long time.

This is really the one challenge in Germany: High fixed costs and high taxes making it hard to sock away seed money yourself.

> profitability will decrease your chances of failure dramatically

This kinda feels like saying a small loan of a million dollars increases your chances dramatically.

The challenge is in getting to that point.

this is why you should focus on a business offer from get-go and start making money from launch

majority of us cannot afford to retire at home for years not making any income

> become profitable from day 1

"just make some money" is not good advice. It trivialises the entire problem and even worse, it's the core problem of everyone in this space. This reasoning is dismissive of their struggle and doesn't help them move towards where they need to be. There is absolutely no good reason to treat other people like that.

i didn't mean to say that

i'm suggesting to try to make money as soon as you can, else you'll just drown like many others

I agree with this. What most developers, like me, love to think is that you can do "one more feature" and they will come, or another refactor, or anything. But I've learned this lesson. Building a startup us very little about coding, and more about all the other things that make up a business. What's your value proposition? How do you sell? How do you acquire users? etc... In the end, I've wasted way too much time on the things that didn't make a difference, but I think I've learned from this.

> better approach is to save some money, leave for a year and become profitable from day 1

In many Western economies, the level of taxation is designed to prevent you from doing that. It would take many years to save enough money to sustain yourself for a year without changing your commitments much. So either way you are in a bad position. I mean it's possible if you don't have a family, share a flat with others so your bills are low and so on, but you may end up just as burnt living in such environment.

Having a supportive spouse probably does wonders for mental health. After 5 years in a relationship I decided to spin up my own business and learned about something I didn't know about significant other - she didn't recognise working for oneself as a legitimate work. For her I was "pissing away" my and her time and I should look for a second job if I wanted to make more money. I managed two years of constant berating, being laughed at and threatened. In the hindsight I wish I had ended the relationship the first time she demonstrated the lack of support. My project would have taken less time to get it to MVP and my mental health wouldn't be in a state it was. After my project started making money she was of course sorry and wanted to get back together. But I am not sure if I ever would want to be with someone else, this is not the first time I have been burned, but first time it hurt so bad. I feel so much better alone.

I know exactly where you're coming from. My family didn't understand or like what I did for a long time. For them, I've wasted my time on what wasn't really "work", because I didn't get a salary. I'm from Germany, you're expected to have a job here. Being an Entrepreneur seems wrong. Luckily, my wife was very supportive. But there are also limits. Let's say that everyone around me had to suffer to some degree so that I was able to pull this off.

> Let's say that everyone around me had to suffer to some degree so that I was able to pull this off.

Even solo entrepreneurship isn't really "solo". Takes a village to raise a {business|baby}.

I am currently building Caido (https://caido.io) without funding and the best decision we ever made was to build it as a team. The second decision that I made differently from my first attempt at a startup was to drop all my freelance contracts and only focus on that project. You need a lot of mental space to build a business and I found I almost burned myself out when I tried to build it while working on other projects. Last decision was to move back to my parent's place to cut cost and live frugally for the year (<300$/month). Not possible for a lot of people, but I don't think it would have been possible otherwise since I don't have savings.

Same as the author we tried to get funding and mostly failed. In the end I think it is for the best as I am not a fan of the growth at all cost, I much prefer to build a smaller sustainable business if that is still possible. One thing that I wish we had is a more experienced person in the team since we burned time and money for stuff we didn't know better (small tear when I see my lawyer bill). It is a great experience otherwise, I just hope it will go somewhere.

A good team is worth its weight in gold.

This is great advice, also take the time to find people that are passionate about what your are doing.

You have some typos on the homepage that may turn some people off.

"WunderGraph let's your access all your systems through a single pane of glass."

Lets* You*

thank you, fixing =)

Hey this is my story! It's been a genuinely fun year. Looking forward to doing better next time. Datastation/dsq are in a great spot and I'm looking forward to them continuing to grow. Happy for your suggestions and flames.

DataStation looks very promising!

i'd like to suggest you to also build a business

else, you'll end up like countless of other startups and open-source projects that existed for a brief moment but failed due to not making any money

try working on both your business offer and your software offer in tandem

your software product should serve your business, not the other way around

this is the approach i'm using right now for Typosaur (.com)

It looks like your projects resonate with people, and more important, you are capable of putting them in front of many eyes. Which is even harder than writing code. For that reason, don't seek the validation of VCs and figure out a business around it. Let your customers be your VCs.

Congratulations on your work :)

Really liked the post! I really admire the attitude & intention that's there – at least from an outside perspective it seems like you've made the most of the experience and sort of had fun with it. Hope to take some inspiration from that.

You just need (to become, to partner with) a business person.

If you’re determined to be CEO get a CEO mentor and an early sales VP who can do all the interpersonal stuff you find uncomfortable.

If you want to stay in product/dev find a cofounder to be CEO. They are late so cofounder doesn’t necessarily mean 50/50 here. Founder vest.

It’s evident your story needs tuning as “I had a hard time paginating results” is not the real story here nor is it very compelling and just reinforces initial uninformed opinion in the space that you’re only scratching an itch that isn’t market-validated.

What are other people doing with your product? That is the story. This feels like it could be a really big thing.

Thanks for documenting what you've been doing.

My main thought midway through your narrative was wondering when you'd realize you're building out a datadog-like tech stack - you mention I think splunk at one point in there at least.

I think a thorough review of datadog and a competitor or two might be interesting for you; the market for 'use SQL for everything' is pretty small. The market for 'use dashboarding tech to read ALL the data' is really very large, and the command line tool you built probably works as middleware.

If I were sitting where you're sitting, I would probably look at two things: could I build a niche datadog competitor with what I've got? If so, you've got really good market comps in public companies and could probably build a pretty great SAAS-model lifestyle business at the very least, which would have value to own, sell, or get investment in for growth.

Second, if I didn't think I could, I would look into selling the CLI-SQL tool in the marketplaces of datadog and so on; their strategy is to allow partners to monetize the customer base by selling tools - this probably wouldn't be a retirement-grade result for you, but I bet the monthly income could significantly beat what you've got so far; those BI tools are expensive, and so incremental charges don't always register, especially if you're bringing new data in the system in a way that was difficult to before. In this case, I'd probably work on a couple quick hits where your tool brought a lot more expressivity to the dashboarding tools. For instance, you can pay extra for log ingestion at datadog, but the tools for dealing with these logs are somewhat limited in the UI. A similarly-priced extension from you that gets better querying might be worth a lot.

At any rate, keep it up, and good luck in the next year!

> How do you query this data or join or filter across such disparate sources? The only two solutions today are to put ALL data into a warehouse or to write custom scripts. The problem with warehouses are that they are expensive and that the ETL process for every new database is expensive too.

> Tons and tons of companies are trying to solve this. You'll get lost among all the vendors trying to capitalize on the “Modern Data Stack”. They're expensive.

Yes, and Yes. However I see a path for a new kind of warehouse that isn't a "Git for Data" or a Databricks' product.

"Topics" (Kafka terminology) containing versioned datasets could help organise and discover what is available in a given repo. The Data versioning would help ensuring reproducibility of any AI pipeline consuming those, because artefacts would be kept unaltered "forever". And finally, availability would be supported by a simple set of read-only replicas.

Your best alternative today consist of stuffing a blob storage with parquet files, and giving write access to a proxy (or to everyone, if you want to live dangerously). Where are append-only semantics ? Conflict-free artefact creation with concurrent reads ?

There is massive opportunities here, it's almost exciting !

PS : > I'm particularly interested in ending up at a database or analytics company. So if you're a database or analytics company hiring managers or developers, feel free to message me!

I see you in the thread, so does a consulting company with a massive Data Science arm is of any interest to you ? :)

> I see you in the thread, so does a consulting company with a massive Data Science arm is of any interest to you ? :)

ha, maybe! You have my email.

I think Pachyderm[0] is exactly what you're describing.

[0]:https://www.pachyderm.com

We used pachyderm before MLOps was even a thing, sadly, back then they tried to solve everything at once while failing with the most basic needs.

If your data versioning "Utilizes a Git-like structure that enables effective team collaboration through commits, branches and rollbacks", then it means you can only consume one version at a time in your pipeline. This is, unfortunately, a fatal flaw. Especially when working with time series !

I also used Pachyderm pre-MLOps (2017+), specifically for time series ML (finance) and didn't see a mismatch between what we wanted and how Pachyderm worked. Were you overwriting/replacing data over time?

It sounds like you’re describing datomic. Though I don’t know if it has the required density.

'The open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in... the answer is basic microeconomics. Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This drives the number of alternatives up, and the prices down to zero.'[1]

5 years later and this still feels correct. From one OSS Dev Tool founder to another - more power & good luck!

[1] https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.htm...

Hey, congrats on the journey!

Especially on the community building aspect, it's really impressive that you've been able to spark so many communities on various platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Discord, etc.)!

On a more technical note, since dsq is based on the "load it into SQLite and query it from there" architecture, have you considered integrating with the plugin ecosystems of other existing projects based on that same architecture, like Datasette[0]? It seems like a way to add a lot of value to your tools without much work.

Just curious, cause I'm thinking about doing something similar for OctoSQL[1] (write an adapter for the rich library of plugins Steampipe[2] has, as they have a similar gRPC plugin-based architecture as OctoSQL), for the reasons I listed above.

On a more commercial note, overall I think tools like this are very hard to monetize, because right now they're just a fairly niche use case, between - as you mentioned - full blown data analytics platforms and observability query systems, as well as standard unix tools. Especially since if you need the analytics a lot, you'll probably have time to integrate it into your preferred analytics solution (like BigQuery). Do you have any thoughts on that?

[0]:https://datasette.io

[1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql

[2]:https://steampipe.io

Hey Kuba!

> Especially on the community building aspect, it's really impressive that you've been able to spark so many communities on various platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Discord, etc.)!

Yeah it's been so cool to see so many people come together, hobbyists and professionals.

> On a more technical note, since dsq is based on the "load it into SQLite and query it from there" architecture, have you considered integrating with the plugin ecosystems of other existing projects based on that same architecture, like Datasette[0]? It seems like a way to add a lot of value to your tools without much work.

Interesting idea! I haven't looked into Datasette too much. And I haven't thought about plugins too much either. The most I've done is extend the SQLite standard library [0] and I hope to continue growing that. I'd be curious to hear what specifically people like from Datasette they'd like to see in dsq.

> On a more commercial note, overall I think tools like this are very hard to monetize, because right now they're just a fairly niche use case, between - as you mentioned - full blown data analytics platforms and observability query systems, as well as standard unix tools. Especially since if you need the analytics a lot, you'll probably have time to integrate it into your preferred analytics solution (like BigQuery). Do you have any thoughts on that?

My idea was always to focus on smaller and less mature organizations, probably ones that have been around for 10+ years. They aren't using BigQuery, they prefer to host everything themselves, and they don't yet realize there are tools like DataStation that they can easily run to make analytics easier.

I've worked at a bunch of companies like this so I know the market exists. Actually I have been surprised how many people outside of this market showed up in the DataStation community. I've seen Googlers, MS-ers, modern startups, data science teams show up interested in DataStation compared to what they're already using.

For me it's just been a matter of time (and funding) to build out the product to serve these communities commercially as a SaaS or enterprise product.

[0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/go-sqlite3-stdlib

Small company here with a data team consisting of 1.5 full time employees. I just found out about DataStation from this post, immediately installed it and I'm loving it. Great work and concepts :)

That's fantastic! Any time you have feedback or ideas, please email me. Address in HN profile.

I've done various flavors of the "solo founder" thing. What I've realized is that promoting a project; and making the economics work are extremely different skills than developing the software.

I personally enjoy the software side too much to be a solo founder. When I'm in a place where I'm able to start something new, I'm going to look rather aggressively for someone to work with who can round out my shortcomings.

Your story is very inspiring and it mirrors closely my experience with building windmill.dev as a solo founder, an OSS project for multi-step automation from minimal scripts. I got lucky enough to get into YC this batch and if this is of any interest to you, we could really use someone with your experience in the founding team. Shoot me an email if of any interest: ruben@windmill.dev

Actually it was because of your post a month ago getting in that made me apply to YC in the first place. Nice work yourself. :)

Is it bad that the first metric the author shares is a borderline vanity metric (Github stars)?

I reacted to this as well. I hope he/she gets real value for the work they put in. Having worked as a developer and consumer of open source work (for huge finance institutions), it pains me to see how devs pour their souls into open source projects, and consumers (our bosses) don’t even know or care who wrote the code everyone is using.

Precisely my concern.

The way I think about it is it's about showing growth by any means. When you're starting from nothing you talk about anything you can. Only in the last few months have I been able to switch from focusing on Github stars in talking to VCs to talking about actual usage by humans.

For the sake of the article though it's a hook I figured might encourage folks to keep reading. :)

No, it’s not bad, it’s good.

Keep in mind the realistic alternative in practice is number of users paying for a yearly subscription. Which would you rather see more often as an engagement metric - subscription plans, or open source users? It would be a sign of vitality for the open source community if github stars were a metric that VCs sought more often.

All metrics for pre-seed startups are based on popularity, that’s what VCs ask for: indicators that people want to use your product, whether it’s monthly active users, monthly recurring revenue, or github stars.

When someone is trying to build it via open source rather than a subscription model, github stars might be the best, or even only available way to track engagement reliably. Also, part of the story was about how long it took to reach a certain number of stars, and they compared it to other projects that got as much engagement more quickly.

Thanks for sharing this.

Regarding funding - I think this is a very crowded space and it is hard to see, how data station will get 10x better than other toolings. E.g. on the self-service side there are solutions like Alteryx, that are progressing quite quickly. On the dev oriented side e.g. for automated productive integrations you have various toolings available e.g. in the could platforms. Yes, they all cost money, but they deliver also value.

There will be a niche certainly for this tool somehow, but I think this path needs to be approached together with customers. So if you find someone who is willing to pay $$$ for a certain addition to the tool, you'll have some light into the direction this could head to be self-sustaining.

Alteryx is quite pricy though - about 5k/seat for the designer.

What you have achieved in one year is pretty impressive. I also think that there is a potential for a good business somewhere in there. If I were you, I would hang in there and change tact a bit. For example, have you considered reaching out to some of your target customers(organizations) to understand what it would take for them to use such a tool? Or what makes them not use the tool? One thing to note is that sales process for enterprise software is tricky e.g A dev might like the solution but someone else writes the check. It's a whole science and it's one factor that influences success

Pursued funding unsuccessfully, zero patrons, only reason its still open source is because they couldnt monetize with venture capital, got lucky in getting internet points, now interviewing for a job

Exactly why you dont do this too

Saved you some time

I mean it's not a success story but it was fun and I've got cooler interviews lined up than I have ever had before, got to speak with VCs for the first time, learned a ton, and got out of it an app I've wanted for years. :)

I would actually recommend this sort of sabbatical if you can afford it and were in a similar situation as I was, basically.

Thanks for sharing it! These are great parts of a tech career

Story of my life

You have a broken link to your repo - I believe https://github.com/multiprcessio/datastation-documentation should be https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation-documentation

Plausible comes into my mind: how Uku found his co-founder in marketing and how things took off from there.

They're now at $1M ARR: https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing

(also open-source btw)

> They weren't a fan of me being a solo founder and they felt the usage wasn't high enough

i don't understand the logic here

why would you need YC if you have found a co-founder and have some usage already? can't you just start making money?

Solo founder means bus factor is high. You don’t even have to die. Having a co-founder increases the chances of you being in it for the long run. But having a co-founder can pose a whole set of problems itself…

I would have thought co-founders are more problematic because they need to agree on everything but it sounds like a solo founder is an overall negative which I found surprising.

> why would you need YC if you have found a co-founder and have some usage already? can't you just start making money?

YC is primarily looking to invest in unicorns that have returns in the 100x-1000x range. Even if you're "making money," you might just be a lifestyle business (e.g. selling custom art on Etsy) or a small business (e.g. family-run bike shop). And while both might be profitable (the owners might even be worth 7+ figures), neither of these have any realistic chance of becoming the next Amazon.

Fellow solo developer here. Making https://gainknowhow.com/ . It's my take on how to keep everyone on the same page at growing organizations. My basic premise is that the current data structure to store documentation in folders is not ideal. A better data structure to store knowledge in a graph of connected ideas. Storing knowledge in this manner ensures users understand context when learning skills. I'd love your feedback.

This looks pretty cool! May I ask what tech stack you use? I always find that info curious.

Is it possible to do more SQL over CSV in the browser? I'd love a simple browser app that I could drop a CSV file into and write SQL against. Right now I use `j`, but its a bit clunky.

Yeah! app.datastation.multiprocess.io supports this!

Here's a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7LEV3ZeQWU&feature=youtu.be

Ooo! that is cool. The UX took a second to get used to, but it meets my needs.

Does this work with larger datasets (10gb+)? Does it upload the data to a server?

It's purely in-browser/in-memory. So no this version won't work for large datasets.

The DataStation desktop or server app will work better for larger datasets but it takes a while to handle data larger than 4GB. It should handle 10gb+ eventually but it will be slow.

It is a bit of a misunderstanding to say that the work hasn’t been funded. It has been funded by lost earnings. If the developer instead could have made (say) $100k working on something else, then the funding was $100k. The same way that not selling a car you have been given for free cost you the money you could otherwise have made selling the car.

If you can, it is always better to go full time.

If you hourly rate is 150$ (in the market), and you can work 300H a month (including weekend) (It should be 400 hours - 13 hours a day).

Than you are basically making around 70-100K a month (in value), but paying only 4K (in cash, your living expenses).

Of course, if you are 2X, 3X , 4X engineer , you are basically making 300K a month for 4K cost.

I'm not sure this makes much sense. If you work for a large corporation you can easily make 100K+ a year and work a very reasonable 40 hours or less a week and live off of 4K a month.

Unless you're actually realizing those gains and earning 300K a month, you are not "basically making 300K a month for 4K cost". You are making 0 dollars a month for 4K cost.

Further, if you think that it will pay you back in full in the future (instead of making the money right away), you will have to invent a wildly successful product and/or customer base to backfill the pay for all the previous hours worked. Realistically, you'll probably make nothing for your first year unless you start with a plan to secure funding. You'll also bust your ass for a year while losing money in the hopes of a reward in the future. I know they say time is money, but it's not money the way you seem to be equating it here haha.

You are saying never start a startup? If you don’t want to take a risk on a startup, you’re much better off taking a salary job than trying to get a high hourly contracting rate.

Strange analysis, these numbers mostly don’t add up. People contracting at an hourly rate almost never get constant consistent work, otherwise you’d get hired on a salary. You have to spend half your time looking for work, and you’re not accounting for that at all. At 400 hours/month, you are suggesting working 90 hours per week for 365 days per year. Having worked this many hours before for stretches, I know first hand this is a recipe for complete and total burnout and depression within a few months. And even 90 hours per week at $150 per hour doesn’t add up to 70k/month, it’s 60k/month. 2x/3x engineer is usually referring to productivity, but not pay. You generally can’t increase your pay by being more productive. Pay scales that you’re talking about ($300/hr, $450/hr, $600/hr) are extremely rare in engineering and come only with niche software markets. Almost nobody is making hourly rates like that, there’s nothing basic about it, this is an unrealistic goal.

Inspiring read, congratulations on the progress and thanks for the write-up.

> That in-browser app is still around and supported today, though I kind of wish it wasn't since it means more code to maintain and test.

Why not sunset it, given it presents an opportunity cost?

Because it's the only 0-download/install demo environment and it's hard (impossible?) to tell from analytics if it's a useful funnel.

Also, it can be convenient for testing/development since it requires no server.

I'm indecisive.

Really impressive that you kept going through all those peaks and troughs. While not financially rewarding, it must have been great exercise for your resilience!

First code in Brython?! I'd never even heard of that but wow, that looks like a monstrous unholy way to write a GUI.

Just the panel eval implementation for Python code panels, not the actual app.

Are GitHub stars a good metric for success?

> How do you query this data or join or filter across such disparate sources? The only two solutions today are to put ALL data into a warehouse or to write custom scripts.

Isn't this whole problem space already addressed by a bunch of multi-source query engines (falling under the buzzword "Data Virtualization"?)

DSQ seems pretty interesting. I don't have a use for it right now, but I'm sure it's something that'll be useful in the future!

Brilliant Idea! I hope you succeed wildly! Upvoted and Favorited!

(Now, as a side note, if funding decisions were up to me, I'd suggest not using VC, never using VC, staying as far away as you can from VC, treating VC as if it were a highly addictive and intoxicating substance, like alcohol is to some people: "When friends don't stop friends from using VC..." (you know, like those old Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ads from the 1980's <g>)

"VC" above = "Venture Capital" (system) not "Venture Capitalist" (person).

(You know, like "Love the sinner, but hate the sin..." or more colloquially in recent times, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game..." <g>)

You might want to read the following articles:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/07/foreword-to-8220er...

But let's say that despite this, you still want to garner some funding...

For whatever reason, after Googling, I can't seem to find a comprehensive list of the various types and tiers of startup financing capital that are available (for example, there are lists of VC's, lists of "Angel Investors", lists of Crowdfunding platforms, lists of ways to bootstrap a business, lists of financial institutions and interest rates for generic borrowing -- but nobody has really sought to unify all of these sources into a single spreadsheet showing an amount of capital borrowed, and what is owed to whom in return for the capital (i.e., Equity (and if so, what %), in the case of VC's, Interest (and what %) in the case of Banks/other lenders, Finished Shipped Product (in the case of Crowdfunding platforms), or other debts/obligations as appropriate).

You could of course, just proverbially "keep the day job", that is, finance the startup costs with other employment -- and avoid all debt/obligations related to borrowing for your business altogether -- at the cost of your time, and working for someone else...

If you absolutely positively (you know, like FedEx! <g>) cannot go without VC of any sort, then you might wish to consider Pioneer's $20,000 for 2% of your company deal (https://pioneer.app/)

This might be better than YC's $125,000 for 7% IF (if and only if!) you can launch your company for $20,000 or less.

If you can launch your company for $10,000 or less, I wouldn't even go with Pioneer, I'd go with Crowdfunding and/or Family & Friends funding and/or bank loans and/or revenue from a day or part-time job...

At least if you self-finance, the "Pound of Flesh" (the drawback or compromise or hook or caveat -- with my apologies to Shakespeare's "The Merchant Of Venice") that could have been present in your company's future -- will never come due!

It's sort of like, pay now or pay later... pay now with due diligence and thrift -- or pay later, when the VC owns you! <g>

Anyway, wishing you well with your blossoming company!

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