Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

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This is excellent advice. There is a local company near me that has been working on their SaaS for almost 2 years now and still yet to launch. They started it on Angular 1 and are now re-factoring it on Angular 2 (or maybe 4 now). During this time they released a small open source Angular library but not even an alpha release of their own product. Keep in mind their product is not gear towards devs. They also hit every Angular conference they can and are always doing dev meetups. That is fine for after you launch and are making $$ but seems like a lot of wasted time and money when you have yet to release a product after 2 years.

During this same period, I launched 2 SaaS products on boring PHP 7 and Python for the backend and HTML, jQuery/intercooler.js for the front-end. Both profitable and growing.

I think sometimes devs don't realize the hardest parts of starting and growing a business have nothing to do with code or the tech stack you choose. Marketing, getting and retaining customers and everything else in between is way harder than writing code.

Honestly, I'd rather use PHP7 or Python. I'm sick and tired of seeing Javascript now.

Being "sick and tired" of a technology is just about as bad a reason to not use it in your business as chasing the shiny new thing.

That is because Angular is a shit technology.

Why? Because it doesn't reduce cognitive load. One seems to require at least as much brain space to code things in Angular, as you do just writing pure Javascript. That's a no-no, that means it's not a labor-saver long-term.

Who are their investors, or if you can't name names, are they seed or angle or self funded or what?

From what I understand, the CEO had a previous company that repackaged, setup & sold custom social network software to companies. He made decent money while it was hot and is using that to fund this endeavor. I guess you can't really blame him if he is self funding. I don't feel right about calling them out by name. I hope it works out for them in the long run.

May I know what you built and they're building? Maybe different product easier with different tech stack?

I use Scala because Google App Engine didn't support PHP for example. It's an Android app, so I use Kotlin for that.

Both SaaS apps. Different markets but one of mine is similar in complexity to theirs. They could have launched a year ago if they were not wasting time re-writing the app in Angular 2 & 4 and spending time open sourcing Angular libraries.

I personally do not want to spend time re-writing my app every 6 months before it is even launched. I would much rather spend the time acquiring customers. I tend to choose a stack at least to start that I know I won't need to re-write in 6 months. Unless of course it needs to be re-written/refactored to accommodate all those customers knocking at my door ;)

That generally means I stay away from the front-end flavor of the week when starting a new app. Don't get me wrong, I myself have used Angular and Vue for a couple of projects but not in the beginning and not for the core product. I don't like the instability and constant changes of a lot of the newer frameworks.

I think the lesson here is use what tools you already know, and are intimately familiar with. There's no reason it takes two years to launch an Angular app, unless you keep updating to use all the latest and greatest features and versions. The same goes for an old workhorse technology like PHP, avoid using the new stuff in favor of proven frameworks and patterns.

Upvoted not just for the comment, but also the user name. Had to do a double-take on that one!

Javascript hipster echo chamber: you're not using react [or insert other trendy framework pushed by code schools and tutorial makers]? Product user: does not give a rip about your precious tech stack.

React has some excellent ideas and quite good performance.

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