We Rewrote Everything in Rust, and Our Startup Still Failed

arnon 5 years ago |

"Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in Haskell instead."

Salty...

jonp888 5 years ago |

I can't believe they didn't use Kubernetes for deployment. What a bunch of amateurs - no wonder their product failed.

ibraheemdev 5 years ago | |

They say that their product failed and they didn't even use Julia? They really had no idea what they were doing.

coldcode 5 years ago |

Great satire. But I have seen teams of incredible engineers doing amazing things perfectly and still go out of business because its not how amazing your engineering is, it's how amazing your product or service is to people who are willing to pay (or someone is willing to pay you).

alangibson 5 years ago | |

"People don't want drills, they want holes" - Guy that started a drill company who's name I forget

dariusj18 5 years ago | | |

A businessman sells you the hole, marketing sells you the drill.

nickelcitymario 5 years ago | | |

Can't tell if you're joking, but I think this is backwards?

dariusj18 5 years ago | | |

I don't think it's backwards, though the term businessman might be swapped for something better.

nickelcitymario 5 years ago | | |

I'm 99% sure the whole drill bit vs. holes analogy was created by a marketer. I could very well be wrong, but I've read it in countless marketing and copywriting books.

It's basically selling the benefit instead of the feature, which is what any half-decent marketer brings to the table. That's basically my simple idea of at least half of what I do as a marketer.

I'm curious though, and I don't mean this in a confrontational way at all. Why do you think marketers sell the bit vs the hole?

cvhashim 5 years ago | |

Classic case of a Chad Node app pulling in millions of dollars vs the virgin Microservices based Go platform who can barely get any traction.

alangibson 5 years ago |

> We pushed back the launch for two months to tweak our build system to perfection

That line got me

codeulike 5 years ago |

Publishing this on Google Docs is so passe, clearly should be on Substack or Ghost

alangibson 5 years ago | |

It'd be way more popular is it was self hosted on Netlify using a static site generator

falcolas 5 years ago | | |

Haven't you heard? The pendulum is swinging back, and Wordpress is all the rage again.

Alex3917 5 years ago |

I realize this is a joke, but regardless these days you basically need to spend ~25% of each year rewriting your app just to stay in security compliance.

ARandomerDude 5 years ago | |

If that's true, you should think about your architecture. It shouldn't require that level of effort.

Alex3917 5 years ago | | |

It's less an issue of our code, and more an issue of third-party APIs from our partners getting deprecated. And Angularjs, where upgrading to angular or rewriting in react doesn't really do anything for end users, but if we want to keep showing up in search results then the writing is on the wall.

marcinzm 5 years ago |

>Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in Haskell instead.

So close yet so far. Given the funding you need to rewrite your app in BOTH Haskell and Rust. Then depending on which one is in favor at launch time you go with that and never mention the other one. Then you look like a prophetic genius company no matter which way the market turns.

joosters 5 years ago | |

Product idea: A program that makes your web app masquerade as any language that you choose! It rewrites and hides your .php extensions, and replaces error pages to make them look appropriate for the chosen technology stack. All the actual js is obfuscated & compiled to WASM to hide the shameful use of jquery/react/angular/vue/whatever is no longer the 'in' tool. You can switch technologies with the push of a button!

rainingcatndogs 5 years ago | | |

A "tech stack spoofer", that would be cool and it can have applications beyond that like for security by obscurity.

tyingq 5 years ago |

"Due to heavy traffic in this file, we are loading a read-only version"

Does that mean it was shared read-write?

kissgyorgy 5 years ago |

This is the best part: "We rewrote our microservices from Node to Go to C++ and then back to Node."

gvb 5 years ago | |

including the next sentence "On every step, we saw 20% performance improvements."

newsbinator 5 years ago |

> The team brainstormed ideas for what we would like to build, and set to work.

This deserves its own chapter.

oopsiforgot7 5 years ago |

If we take this satire more seriously then it's meant, which was the biggest mistake?

Lack of market research right? They should at the very least have done it post launch. Maybe more pre launch too?

I think many of the other ones might have been survivable?

colesantiago 5 years ago |

satire is missing from the title.

colmvp 5 years ago | |

I mean if you need a satire tag to realize this is satire, I don't know what to say.

Danieru 5 years ago | | |

It was real to me until the last paragraph. Everything else read real in the style of a repentant founder.

cmpb 5 years ago | | |

I'm just saying, it took me until halfway down page two to realize it.

blast_hardchese 5 years ago | | |

That's nothing, I still don't know it's satire.

sidpatil 5 years ago | | |

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

oldcopernicus 5 years ago |

Everyone knows that successful startups uses only Java or PHP

redleggedfrog 5 years ago |

If only it were satire...

lukehutch 5 years ago | |

Pretty sure it's 100% satire, but that doesn't mean it's not the story of 80% of startups.

say_it_as_it_is 5 years ago |

It turns out that the startup was a hemp farm. The founders never communicated the vision with the developers and just let them run loose to see what they'd do.

echelon 5 years ago |

I get that this is satire, but leave Rust out of it. Rust is blameless when it comes to bad business ideas and execution.

You shouldn't be scaring people away from a language that offers so much. Rust is not hard like all the dumb memes make it out to be. For startups where performance is vital (media, streaming), I'd argue it'll be indispensable [1].

The Rust bullying harms our community. We don't have the corporate backing of Go. Pick on something from Google or Apple instead.

[1] I wrote my media-intensive webapp, https://vo.codes, in Rust and I'm quite productive.

alangibson 5 years ago | |

Relax. Everyone gets that this isn't about Rust, and that it's about focusing on technology for its own sake.

tyingq 5 years ago | |

It's just a popular target, as in "Rust Evangelism Strikeforce". Typically, it's a good sign when people start poking fun.

tyingq 5 years ago | | |

Oh, also, I liked this: https://imgur.com/noUdCET

martingxx 5 years ago |

Everything about this screams satire, except it just doesn't have the typical humour element (to me at least), so I'm not even sure now.

ARandomerDude 5 years ago | |

One way to know: it lacks any real specifics like company name, any hint of what the product is, investment details, etc.

fouc 5 years ago |

mirror at https://outline.com/yr7ZBS

thojest 5 years ago |

Brilliant write up! Made me laugh a lot, especially the end with Haskell :)

noxer 5 years ago |

Link goes to a google docs login page. No wonder they failed^^

joosters 5 years ago |

'...Our incredible journey...'

I hope they were thinking of https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ when they wrote this!

jollofricepeas 5 years ago |

Should of rewrote in Clojure.