<story><title>RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)</title><url>https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database &lt;i&gt;per se&lt;/i&gt;, they are just a means to some other end.&lt;p&gt;People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to sell a compelling solution to a somewhat boring but very valuable business problem that just happens to require an amazing database capability behind it. That’s your moat, the customer doesn’t actually care that there is an amazing database engine behind it but it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate.&lt;p&gt;Filed under “lessons I learned the hard way”.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endymi0n</author><text>On the other hand, any kind of technology in infrastructure is a prime candidate for open source, the incentives are just very much aligned there.&lt;p&gt;Infrastructure tech makes for a great case that helps everyone while giving nobody a competitive advantage, that&amp;#x27;s why companies love doing or sponsoring it.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, open source tech in infrastructure helps get rid of vendor lock-in as in the worst case, you could still look inside the source code and patch things — also fancy FOSS tech makes for good community building efforts and shiny job ads, both attracting good devs.&lt;p&gt;Both effects together explain to me why open source makes for such a fierce competitor in any kind of paid infra tech, it&amp;#x27;s hard to build the momentum to outrun them.&lt;p&gt;And open core? Pretty much dead by now since as soon as the cloud providers see there&amp;#x27;s traction around any technology, they will build a hosted version, either directly or in a protocol compatible fashion.&lt;p&gt;Techies really dig this stuff (I do too), but as a business model, there aren&amp;#x27;t many worse ones in 2021.</text></comment>
<story><title>RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)</title><url>https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database &lt;i&gt;per se&lt;/i&gt;, they are just a means to some other end.&lt;p&gt;People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to sell a compelling solution to a somewhat boring but very valuable business problem that just happens to require an amazing database capability behind it. That’s your moat, the customer doesn’t actually care that there is an amazing database engine behind it but it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate.&lt;p&gt;Filed under “lessons I learned the hard way”.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ignoramous</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;...the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your comment reminds me of April Dunford&amp;#x27;s post on how she helped position a database product: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.thefxck.com&amp;#x2F;interviews&amp;#x2F;product-positioning-april-dunford&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.thefxck.com&amp;#x2F;interviews&amp;#x2F;product-positioning-april...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>