zlacker

Out of curiosity, who else did it besides RedHat ( who are building Linux distros AFAIK ) ?

How do you expect people to bootstrap an infra SaaS? I just don’t see how you can seriously attempt something like an Auth0 competitor startup without any money. I mean it’s nice to not take VC money but you are going to be broke for a long long time - and you still have the same failure rate as with VC.

So you need to be super masochistic to work for nothing for years with a 99% of everything will evaporate at any point - and at the same time somehow convince companies to build on your stack - not only build on it but make it the gatekeeper and front door of everything. I can tell you that you will have an extremely hard time to get any customers for this, regardless of how great the tech is.

Maybe you don’t need it at seed stage - but unless you are fantastically rich already you need some investment to get beyond seed stage IMHO.

>>crngef+(OP)
> How do you expect people to bootstrap an infra SaaS?

Presumably ilrwbwrkhv is thinking of the fate of ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, CockroachDB, Confluent, TimescaleDB, Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, Docker Desktop and suchlike.

The VCs want a return for all the money they've invested, and it's difficult to monetise a free product.

One way to avoid letting down your community is to have your product be a closed-source paid product from day 1. Another is to get the backing of a huge multinational with endless ad revenue. Another is to run a super lean one-man operation, or get a day job and make free software your hobby. Another is to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and hope one of your users just acquires your entire company.

Or you can just disappoint your community - SAML's only used by faceless megacorporations anyway, it's not like you'd be letting down real people.

None of these are great options IMHO - but that's why I don't have a VC-funded infrastructure startup myself :)

>>crngef+(OP)
Laravel and that whole ecosystem is another great example. Open source is slow and a grass roots movement. That's what I mean, when people think it is venture scale, they are either being dishonest to the investors or to the users. Because one day the ethos of open source has to be broken to make the real money. Better to make it a paid product from day 1 instead of playing this game.

One of my favorite bad examples of this is Supabase. They played into the whole open source Firebase bandwagon and while their code is available, the ethos of open source is completely lost, so much so that even now local development and self hosting is a pain.

In terms of good examples, Andrew Sherman who does Drizzle ORM is a good example of this. Here is one of his tweets talking about not taking VC money: https://x.com/andrii_sherman/status/1775954643022971044

> I quit my job to start working on Drizzle full-time. It's still not VC-backed(and will never be!), and we are still doing everything thanks to our great sponsors and our first successful B2B integrations.

So it can work but honestly the best open source projects start off when you are getting paid a salary and you work on the project because you are passionate and love working on it.