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Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

Any chance to start a new company? I think original company failed because it had too much overhead (SF office, marketing, investors...)

There is a good brand, existing user base, big customers with references...

Lean distributed company could make a good profit here with minimal investment.

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Argh! They didn’t charge for the component of their offering that was most valuable. Period. Good software doesn’t pay for itself. Consulting and training are difficult to scale, mostly because they require adding people. As such, the margins are minuscule compared to software. “Free” gets you downloads and publicity, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I really liked Rethink’s story and how well they executed things like branding and developer outreach, but without being able to capture the value of what they were producing it’s hard to see how that’s sustainable.

That doesn't mean they can't wrap the word "Enterprise" around a version of their product and sell it at $xxx per license so long as it comes with support. Redhat does this. They can even change to only do consulting on the "Enterprise" version of the software so revenue goes up.

Anyway, the company is wound down and the team has moved on. None of this speculation matters anymore.

Then they need an enterprise sales team to rival MongoDB's. Enterprise software doesn't sell itself - you need an expensive consultative sales process, which itself is a different core competency. A lot of the hate for MongoDB comes from them being a sales-driven company while RethinkDB chose to create an engineering-driven culture.

I think, sadly, that the only way to save Rethink would be to hire a big marketing team / evangelist team and try to dethrone Mongo. But i don't see that coming.

Could you be more specific? I think path similar to Redis would work just fine.

Redis was largely built by one person, and was sponsored by Pivotal. I don't think this would have been attainable.

mongodb folks are indeed aggressive.

I had one person really hounding me to pitch mongodb to my organization basically suggesting it as a huge boon to productivity and it would be trivial to rewrite all our rdbms based apps on top of mongodb.

I'm not sure how well they're doing, but some less knowledgeable than I might have taken the bait.

If it wasn't for aggressive marketing, no one would even consider such a madness.

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