codegeek

Before you think about lawyers, I would say be careful dealing with industry leaders because they may just be sniffing and not really serious. There are plenty of cases where a larger industry leader reaches out in disguise of acquisition and then gets the details and does it on their own. Not saying it is the case necessarily here but just be careful of that.

For example, ask yourself why they really need to buy you out. Why can't they build it themselves ? Is it really your customer base they want ? Is it your technology ? Do they just want you (acquihire) ? What is the moat here that they want to acquire you ? If you cannot answer that clearly, they may not be serious.

In terms of finding a lawyer, you need to find a lawyer who has experience in tech acquisitions especially in your jurisdiction/area (for example, in US, even the state of residence will come into play). Selling a business involves various things including whether it will be asset vs stock sale (you will need to learn the difference),what will be the terms (all cash upfront vs earn out/equity etc).

Be ready to spend $1000s or even $10,000+ on lawyers and the deal may still fall through. So are you ready to spend your own cash ($10,000+ or higher) and still be ready for the fact that deal falls ?

Just some things to keep in mind.

I would at least update body tag to add basic css to make this more readable:

    <body style="width:80%;margin:auto;">

The thing is that most people who claim that AI will kill SAAS have never run a SAAS business themselves or have never properly used a SAAS as a real customer for multiple years.

SAAS companies are not just about the software. They provide a series of things including hosting/maintenance, support, data, integrations and most importantly: solving a problem that customer is not interested in solving themselves because they hae more core problems to solve for their own business.

Is it true that some SAAS companies need to go out of business or do better than what they do now (e.g. locked in contracts, shitty support etc) ? Yes, absolutely. However, AI or vibe coding is not magically going to solve this problem.

At the end of the day, SAAS is a business model that has extreme value.

Source: I may be biased as a SAAS founder but I can assure that majority of our customers are not waking up daily and thinking "How can I stop paying this company $xx,xxx/Year for my business where it makes me $xxx,xxx/Year without me needing to hire/build my own product/team". Most of them certainly don't even think about "lets vibe code this shit". How do I know ? They are telling me on a daily basis. Sure, they need us to get on the AI bandwagon to solve their problems a little faster than now. If we cannot keep up, someday they may leave who can solve their problem faster/cheaper but they are not going to vibe code their own homegrown solution. In fact, we routinely migrate B2B customers from their own homegrown solutions (even before AI).

I am not that smart to use Rust so take it with a grain of salt. However, its syntax just makes me go crazy. Go/Golang on the other hand is a breath of fresh air. I think unless you really need that additional 20% improvement that Rust provides, Go should be the default for most projects between the 2.

You can build a .NET application without being locked in the usual MS ecosystem. I am building a greenfield SAAS product in .NET with VueJS and Postgres. Will deploy on AWS, Cloudflare etc.

I am building a new product from scratch in .NET. Not the full traditional MS stack but just .NET for backend and VueJS for frontend and Postgres for DB. I don't use things like Azure, SQL Server etc but .NET is solid. So yes.

Incredible. I am really interested in trying pgdog for our B2B SAAS product. Will do some testing.

Stupid question but does this shard the database as well or do we shard manually and then setup the configuration accordingly ?

May be dont show them under "Show HN" unless the post has accumulated a certain number of points/upvotes ? Just like a regular new post comes on front page.

Most B2B SAAS is not going to go to zero just because of AI. B2B Customers don't want to build their own tools generally unless it is their core business. Before AI, customers used to hire developers/vendors to solve a problem. After AI, customers will continue to do the same. They may ask about doing things with AI, sure.

Source: I sell a complex B2B SAAS and even though customers are open to learning more about using AI and are curious, I never had a customer ask so far "Hey so now this AI thing is out, do I really need to you the $xx,xxxx/Year because I can build this in a weekend now, right?". The software is just 1 thing. Customers want stability, support, maintenance, someone to call if shit breaks and if a SAAS vendor does a decent job at it, they won't leave.

If anything, customers who are AI adaptors are asking to collaborate with their existing vendors if possible.

I am not sure if AI is a complete bubble. To me, it is similar to Amazon, Uber etc in their early days when they were just burning cash but were providing something of great value to consumers. Ultimately, they figured out a way to get cash positive.

I think once the dust settles n next 2-5 years, few clear winners will remain who will figure out a way to become cash positive.

You are jumping to conclusions. The author is the CTO of the largest online brokerage in India but more importantly, they have created many open source software of good quality. His website and blog are of great quality. Whether you think this library deserves more attention or not is your personal preference but it is far from spam. I havr no affiliation with them but like their work.

"$60M Seed round"

I guess when you are Ex-Github CEO, it is that easy raising a $60M seed. I wonder what the record for a seed round is. This is crazy.

Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15 years after acquisition but barely.

I am considering DO App Platform for a new project. Would you be open to sharing any lessons learned ?

I am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM :).

Sorry but tailwindui is not a SAAS. There is no service or hosting. You buy a coded template once and then receive updates. It is totally not the same as a critical B2B SAAS that is running 24-7 on the vendor's servers providing real support and service.

I have sold B2B SAAS for 10+ years and I have seen it all. It all depends on the size of your buyer's organization, amount of politics involved (if larger org), red tapes to go through and various other challenges.

Let's break it down a bit.

- For prospects where company size is less than 50 employees or so, the owner/founder(s) are usually involved even if not from Day 1 and it is a lot easier to try and close the deal considering they have a real need/want for what you are selling.

- For prospects where company size starts going into 50-100 or more, now you are dealing with smaller teams with their own needs/politics etc. Not always, but often. This is where a good "champion" who may not be the final decision maker but is mostly sold on your product can be very helpful. Now, the downside is that if you cannot convince the champion, you will never get to the decision makers or will be very hard because they will just tell you to talk to the champions first.

I don't think a tool can solve this problem considering that is the premise of your post. It is a human problem.

They have 1000s if not 100s and 1000s of customers. I know because my company is an edtech platform and we have a lot of customers using vimeo as their video host.

I dont know the solution but few things that are root cause:

- Internet and Social Media

- Neighborhoods no longer are walkable especially suburbs at least in America. Kids are not encouraged to go bike to their friends place anymore because of traffic risks.

- High Trust societies have degraded into "lets keep ot myself, I can't trust anyone these days". Decades ago, you could just walk into a neighbor's home and say hello. Now, you need an appointment just to talk to a neighbor or are too worried what they will think of you.

- No real friendships after school/colleges. This is a huge deal once you are out on your own in the real world. Work relationships are meh at best and with remote work nowadays, it has become even worse.

- Even if you join a club or activity, they are too "planned" and "robotic". For example, my kids take a dance class and they said they don't like it. I realized why. There is no break. They don't even get to spend like 30 mins with other kids socializing etc. There is a fixed schedule. You go, you dance, you leave.

But this is the world today. So I don't know how to fix it.

Every developer should learn the basics of Servers, Linux, VPS hosting etc. It is not that hard especially with the amount of information that's online. You mentioned Golang. For those languages, it is even easier because you literally host a single binary on the VPS. So go ahead, learn it. The naysayers will scare you into thinking that you need someone else to do it for you but you usually don't. Not unless you are running an app with mission critical requirements and at scale.It is totally ok to host your own app on a VPS that gets a few hundred requests in a day or even more.

My suggestions:

1. Start with a specific OS on a linux box. Ubuntu is a standard one that you can just start with.

2. Install your application first without docker. If binary (e.g. Golang), you can literally copy the binary (make sure you build it for your OS on the server) and then run it either using something ike supervisor/systemd

3. Then, use a reverse proxy like Caddy in front of it for SSL and actual domain.

4. Get a custom domain from any provider and set the DNS for that domain to point to the IP address of this server.

5. If you want to get real fancy, instead of pointing d0main directly to the IP of the server, get a DNS with cloudflare and point there. Then configure cloudflare to point to the actual server (a.k.a origin server) This way, you get additional benefits like WAF, DDOS protection etc. Even cloudflare free plan offers this with some limits.

Then repeat the process in 2,3 but with docker container.

You can do all of this easily in ChatGPT etc nowadays by asking:

- I want to install a Go App on an Ubuntu VPS using systemd/supervisor and put Caddy as reverse proxy in front. Then I will want to use a custom domain where DNS is hoted with Cloudflare which ultimately points to Caddy.

It is not that hard. Not to learn at least.

Exactly. This is a very low effort post. OP wants a chilled job but also wants autonomy, fully remote and are on a Visa. I would be doing the opposite of looking for a chill job if I am on a visa especially right now.

Not $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0. Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other smaller sponsors as well.

Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.

Yea I agree that free UI kits like ShadCN basically blew everyone else away. I mean ShadCN has over 100k Stars on Github which is more than even Tailwind. So you can imagine the popularity. Having said that, I do think that AI is a factor as well because most of these components can now be coded by AI as well.

For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.

There is no official alert from HN. People have built their own. You can try this one that has been running for a while:

https://www.hnreplies.com/

Tell me the company you work for and I can give you a few reasons why your work makes the world a better place. It is not a binary thing. Almost all work we do has some meaning no matter how boring or useless it may seem.

For example, lets take whatsapp. We can talk about how it erodes user privacy and has access to so much data and is more dangerous especially after being owned by FB. However, why do you think it became so big ? It helped connect you with anyone across the world in a second with incredible speed and accuracy. Before whatsapp, there was nothing remotely close (I know because I have family across the world and before whatsapp, it was always a battle to connect with them over a quick call).

So is whatsapp an evil company/product or did it make the world a better place ? You can say both depending on how you look at it. This argument can be made for almost all work in my opinion.

This doesn't make sense. Nvidia literally has offices all over the world including India (a country that gets the most flak for offshoring). So why now ? Suddenly, "offshoring bad" ? I don't buy it. I think it is more about AI data centers. I could be wrong.

I have a question about Monorepo. Do companies really expose their entire source code all in one repo for their devs to download ? I understand that people can always do bad things if they want but with monorepo, you are literally letting me download everything right ?

I am sorry for the OP but this is a perfect example of "You don't need cloud at your stage". Get a $10 VPS and call it a day. Unless you have 1000s of daily active users, a $10 VPS with a solid backup strategy will work. Heck, you can even do more than that with a decent VPS. You could setup a docker compose on 1 single decent server and call it a day when you have 0 users.

Run an LMS product. https://academyofmine.com Working on a big pivot for next year. Funny but the pivot is to go more headless but for learning platform. Would follow your journey going forward.