RethinkDB: why we failed

But these companies that would pay aren't going to roll out new products on a database only a few folks have heard of.

Let's suppose in an alternate universe Slava had made Rethink his hobby project and it had taken ten years to get to where it is today. Even then, companies that had taken a gamble on it may still be a few years out from where the survivors can (and it would make economic sense to) buy a support contract, but their runway would have potentially carried them into the sweet spot of having early adopters become paying customers.

> I am hesitant to dismiss the market entirely – partly because I don’t want to generalize from a single experience, partly because I don’t like saying “it cannot be done”, and partly because there are quite a few exceptions. GitHub, MongoDB, and Docker have built formidable companies. GitLab and Unity seem to be doing well.

I think the mentioned examples are less developer tools companies than developer services companies.

Cloud offering with build-in redundancy (herokudb, RDS, Redis Cloud) is what most app stakeholders are looking for. We want to try RethinkDb but we don't want to deal with servers.

If rethinkdb is good, i hope someone can resurrect this as a cloud service.