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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

If they had done so by presenting a product that was picked up due to it's merit and continued to gain traction based on that then I'd be rather impressed. Instead the story of MongoDB seems to be how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO, there have been performance comparisons showing it isn't even the best at what it does so this IPO is riding on the network effect of those early stages of marketing alone.

In our economy this is sadly an entirely valid route to making money but their mindshare is going to continue to collapse as the warts on their product show more and more.

So the admiration you have should probably be directed at the wool the marketers behind MongoDB managed to pull over your eyes.

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Most people forget that with startups, what you are trying to create is a business... the technology behind is only one element to it.

It is extremely difficult to do good marketing and sales and they did it.

Solve a customer problem while building a healthy business... a success story in my book.

Agree - I think there is a perception that if you build an awesome product it sells itself.

There is so much work to running a successful business, especially at that scale. Marketing, Sales, Implementation, Support, on top of G&A, and that's not even touching on HR and retaining employees in a competitive market.

There is a reason some people are known as the "business" guys, I think expertise in that area is underrated, especially among people who've only worked at smaller companies or startups.

Edit: Genuinely curious to know why I'm being downvoted. Care to elaborate on why you're downvoting?

Have no idea why you're being downvoted. I think your point is salient and under appreciated. Certainly from my own experiences it's easy to get caught up in the product and the tech, and not focus enough on the biz side of things. Ie. Sales and Marketing.

Basically I'm in complete agreement with you, and feel this is a hard learned lesson.

Speculation: You were being downvoted because software types often express ideas that can be summed up as business is easy and the people doing the business aspects aren't important. They seem to think that everyone and anyone can do it and, when they hear success stories as examples, it reinforces those ideas.

A good example is some of the comments that software folks make about the sales department.

They are different skillsets and people have varied abilities in each. The business aspect is not actually easy. It is also not always done well. The software end isn't always done well, either.

My guess would be that is why you were being downvoted. I notice a number of votes are emotional in nature. They aren't based on logic. I see some that are most easily explained as, "I don't want to know." The comment is factual, not confrontational, and topical. The vote is still negative.

Meh... I don't mind it when it happens to me. I have karma to spare and don't actually make comments for the points. I say what I feel needs to be said and try to stick mostly within the guidelines. (I do meander off topic sometimes.)

But, no... I don't comment for the points. I comment for the replies and thoughts. They are usually quite brilliant and insightful.

I did not downvote the parent comment, but I did downvote you, because I think your comment stereotypes "software types" in an unfair way. It is possible to both have a lot of respect for the difficulty of building the business side of an organization and for the folks who can do it well, and to think that it is unwise to build a business based mostly on sales and marketing without focusing enough on the quality of the product itself.

You missed the part where I said 'often.' That is okay by me. Karma is only good if you spend it.

Sure, but your speculation suggests that the "often" is enough to explain the parent's downvotes. I think there's a better explanation that doesn't impugn certain "types" of people. I'm just speculating too of course.

Just out of curiosity, what do you think is a better (and more probable) answer?

Sorry I just saw this - it's what I said in my original comment that you replied to, I think a better and more probable explanation is that people "have a lot of respect for the difficulty of building the business side of an organization and for the folks who can do it well, [but that they] think that it is unwise to build a business based mostly on sales and marketing without focusing enough on the quality of the product itself".

I didn't downvote you, but if I had, it would be because while you're right that building sales and marketing is difficult and doing so successfully is certainly admirable, another fundamentally important part of creating a successful software business is building a successful product. I suspect your downvoters don't believe that Mongo has actually done that part.

There are a lot of successful software businesses built on terrible products. In fact, in my experience, a lot of startups put far too much emphasis on software quality. As painful as it is for many developer/designer entrepreneurs to hear, if your product solves the customer's problem at a price they're happy to pay then more than good enough to sell to them, even if it's absolute garbage from a tech perspective.

There are plenty of reasons to write good quality code (it's more maintainable, moves faster, more secure, requires less resources, more fun, etc) but "because you won't be successful if you don't" really isn't one of them.

Mongo as a business has largely catapulted itself to where it is by making money off of information assymetry more than actual technical superiority. They may have since corrected a lot of the fundamental technical isssues with their product, but that doesn’t change the fact that (contrary to SV dogma) their success doesn’t rest on the creation of wealth, only its extraction from magpie-type customers. Downvoters likely chafe at the notion that such a strategy is laudable or valid.

Even assuming that the product is so-so, saying that they did not create wealth is a bit disingenuous. They basically created "NoSQL" discussions at a time where most settled on some SQL variant despite their difficulties.

It's not like they were just a vendor of some other product. They actually spent money on the product, on evangelism (kind of marketing, but also kind of development), on so much.

Stripe's technical achievements at first were basically "a nice button" and a slightly friendlier risk model. Yet they are lauded (as they should be!). We can cut Mongo some slack given how we act about other companies.

I would say that NoSQL was more popularized by Amazon’s whitepaper on Dynamo, which they published in 2007.

"their success doesn’t rest on the creation of wealth, only its extraction from magpie-type customers"

To make such an assertion, you're going to have to provide evidence that the people using Mongo and it's services, are, in fact too stupid to know what's good for them, and that they are absolutely better off using something else.

I'm not sure HN celebrates products for simply being successfully marketed.

That said, I do think they made a way of handling a data model pleasurable. Different paradigm++

>> not sure HN celebrates products for simply being successfully marketed

Except that Mongo didn't find success through "simply being successfully marketed". So many people in this thread cannot seem to understand how to look at the business as a whole. Software devs are blasting the software for not being a mind-blowing piece of technology, while not understanding that it has its niche and - apparently - a good business strategy.

You cannot (typically) succeed by only having an amazing product. You also (typically) cannot succeed by dumping millions into sales and marketing for a truly garbage product. The product itself and the business behind it are both necessary elements for success.

There are a lot of developers in this thread trying very hard to appear smart by jumping on the "Mongo is a joke" bandwagon.

Have you looked at their financials? They are in the same bandwagon as their technology.

Mongo's business model is "exploiting the technically naive". They are the CueCat of databases.

Exploiting with products available for free? Oh really?

The first taste is always free

How is it exploitative to give something away for free?

Imagine if everyone using MongoDB had to pay for it, you know, like most things in the world?

I suggest they are giving away their cake and picking up a few crumbs after the fact.

Builders don't typically give away homes to sell a few cabinets.

I agree but given that the technology is the product here, they’re in a bit of a different situation. Evaluating the technology is evaluating the product here.

During my first startup as the CTO I made the mistake of thinking this way. I was so wrong I burned through 2M like it was nothing.

The "product" of a startup is a sustainable business model that can scale fast. The core technology may or may not be a key element part of that model.

So they solved a customer problem with interesting technology - regardless of arguments if it ACID compliant, or as good as <replace with whatever you think is "better">.

Where they sustainable at the beginning? No. Are they sustainable now and did they scale appropriately? Yes.

As a startup that went through it stages, they did it. This is not easy because it requires all the elements to work properly (market need, sales, marketing, engineering, operations, etc).

So what if RethinkDB/or_other has a feature that is better? Irrelevant.

Even better they did this ethically, which is more than I can say about other "startups" with insane funding and dubious and questionable strategies.

Ah, right, like RethinkDB?

As much as I'd love this to be true, the #1 measure of success is if people even know you exist and #2 is if you solve enough of a customer's problems that it's worth using your product. MongoDB hit these two points hard right out of the gate and are now very successful because of it.

MongoDBs clients are much more simple to use than that of RethinkDB. Imho that was the number one reason it didn’t gain traction.

I'm curious what you mean by this. We use a combination of RethinkDB + Deepstream at work and it's amazing to work with with really simple querying language. I might very well be missing something, though, as I'm not the main developer so not too deep into it.

For one is the extra database handle and run I have to use every time, instead of the commands being methods to the db handle object. The repetition of males code more verbose.

Secondly, it’s the ReQL. It’s not native but not JSON based either. A weird hybrid mix.

But it’s only my personal opinion based on my taste.

I think it all comes down to what definition is of solving a problem.

What Mongo did is implementing these features just well enough so they can put checkpoint in their marketing brochures.

When you actually start using it you learn that most of it is either performing slow, does not work correctly or once in a while corrupts your data.

Yes they hit these points hard, but only from marketing point of view. They are now universally hated by ops and developers because these people now have to deal with fallout.

RethinkDB actually is an example that database is something that's not good as a base for a startup[1], and the Open Source approach (like PostgrSQL) is more suitable.

MongoDB is example that you can base a startup on a database technology and succeed, if you can sleep well at night that your product can cause people to lose data.

[1] The reason RethinkDB failed was because they refused to provide half solutions like MongoDB, everyone expects startup to start making money, but building a reliable databases is not something that's easy and can't be done quickly.

Because of the term 'NoSQL' people (programmers) assumed they could throw all the information all those neckbeards are whining about overboard. Because NoSQL, people don't seem to treat it like a database and just toss data in it and run queries in the most insane manner possible. Just ignore the fact that your code makes it so that every single query is doing a full tablescan! That doesn't matter on NoSQL right? For a long time, case insensitive queries on a field were done (and recommended) using a regexp...

> Yes they hit these points hard, but only from marketing point of view

MongoDB serviced one of my projects for 5 years without a single hitch. It did everything I wanted it to do, it did it well, it did it exactly as advertised (no more, no less), and it did it right when I needed it. It never stopped improving during those years, massively in some aspects. The company behind it only grew stronger during those years, and along with it, so did my confidence that my project wouldn't need to undergo re-engineering further down the line.

Seriously, as a professional software developer, what more do you want.

Based on my experience, your use case was simple enough that any database would do just fine.

Our use case was not simple, but MongoDB made it simple to implement. We used pretty much every feature of MongoDB. Any other database could have been coerced to do what we needed, of course, but with greatly varying degrees of extra complexity or overhead.

Please elaborate on how your use case was not simple, and how your data was not relational in the slightest.

My experience too, 6 years. Never been a fanboy, but don't understand the hate either. MongoDB never surprised me, the tradeoffs were known in advance (at least the ones that mattered to me).

And there are no bad reviews of Rethinkdb because nobody used it for real

There was at least one review from someone who switched from RethinkDB to Postgres, which includes a lot of pain points and the line:

> A RethinkDB employee told me he thought I was their biggest user in terms of how hard I was pushing RethinkDB.

http://blog.sagemath.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.ht...

>how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO

Thats how most products succeed if you ask me.

I don't disagree, but we haven't seen them close the distance in terms of performance.

Let me clarify a bit, I'm not saying that this tactic is invalid or inefficient within our current system, in fact this is a great way to land a good payday if you can pull it off. My point was more that MongoDB is going to implode when their performance shortfalls become visible to the wider populace, if that happens, of course. It's still possible they take the earnings from this IPO and dump heavy into R&D investment to make up the lost ground, but it's also very possible they take this payday and ride out the tech until it breaks down.

Even minor things like picking a product name had impact. They also implemented most desirable features (the gotcha was that they were half assed, but if your evaluation was also half assed as is usually done you won't notice it)

I actually chose it back in 2010 project and on paper MongoDB looked better than other databases. MongoDB name as they mentioned originates from Humongous Database giving false impression that it can scale well.

> Even minor things like picking a product name had impact.

They get zero points for this.

It pretty much reads as "Retard"DB in Portuguese, Spanish, and IIRC German.

Not that it is 100% reliable but I put "mongo" in Google translate for all three of those languages and it comes out "mongo". Unless mongo is "slang" in those languages.

It is slang, short for "mongoloide".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mongo

Interesting this isn't the case with English.

English would be "mong". Probably because we got lazy with our abusive terms in the 70s and 80s.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mong#English (Etymology 3)

It was picked up due to merit, IMNSHO, just not the for the factors you think highly of.

It didn't do ACID, not even nearly, but it did other praiseworthy things, with "laser focus on four critical things: onboarding, usability, libraries and support" (https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html). Please don't be disparaging about any of those four.

Amen to that. The first time I used MongoDB it was stupid easy to get started. We implemented data replication from MySQL into MongoDB in a 3 hour hackathon, something that would have taken at least a week for a relational database. For a full description of the experience see:

http://scale-out-blog.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-mysql...

Don't put down 'easy'. It's incredibly hard to do well.

P.s., I'm DBMS guy and have lived and breathed Jim Grey-style transactional consistency for decades. I'm still impressed by what they did.

How did MongoDB go to market differently than the other enterprise NoSQL DBs (MarkLogic, DataStax)?

I’m told they absolutely flooded tech meetups in the SV area and with advertorial talks - talks on NoSQL (that just happened to use MongoDB of course), lots of FUD about SQL vs. NoSQL etc etc.

I’ve no idea to what extent this was true, or if it was whether it was their main marketing approach, but it might have been quite an effective strategy: talks at meetups are often 'trusted' to a greater extent than other ways of reaching devs & if you can find a new generation of devs who are just starting out and hook them on your product before they get the chance to explore other approaches then it could work. High cost of course (someone has to pay for all that time) but if it gets you a leg up on your competitors in a $billion business then that’s what the VC money is for...

MongoDB was huge at hackathons, too. People could implement an app in a weekend using MongoDB because it had no integrity checks and none of its drawbacks manifest themselves in the first two days of development.

I totally get this, but a hackathon is a one time software build and you don't need to lean heavily on a schema if you've only got one state your data has ever existed in, MongoDB is great for templating like this.

However, when it comes to writing software that's meant to survive changes and versions the schema ends up providing a safety net that ensures you can ignore the data that exists and assume that the structure described by your schema is consistent. Data integrity is key to maintainability and those constraints are what keep your data clean.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that they seeded the hackathons with ringers too: Devs on payroll that turned up & implemented a website/app in a weekend that naturally 'just happened' to use MongoDB.

Makes you wonder what other meetup/hackathon visible tech is really covert marketing...

> their mindshare is going to continue to collapse as the warts on their product show more and more

I'm not clear on why you think this—software products with huge mindshare and an open contribution model, get their warts fixed, usually by programmers sponsored by corporations repackaging the software (Redhat and Canonical with Linux) or running the software in a SaaS model (Cloudant with CouchDB.)

- "We are better then you are. We have better stuff..."

- "You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBri-xgYvHQ

Javascript, x86, MySQL, DOS.... the market victors in this industry are often just "good enough" technologically speaking and sometimes even kinda suck.

Add MongoDB to the list. Its "good enough", and marketed well.

That seems to be the business model of all "enterprise" products.

Good for them. I hope their longer-term employees who likely traded lower salary for stock options get a nice windfall from this.

What would you consider to be a "top-notch" NoSQL database?

DynamoDB, Cassandra

Has MongoDB improved post funding? I got involved in Docker early and invested about a year of work into a project based on Docker. Docker was slow and had warts and my project ultimately is almost unusable due to Docker's slowness and warts. I knew about the warts near the beginning, but I assumed that when they got $40million, they would fix the warts. They didn't. Indeed, it seems that quality has not changed since they got funded, perhaps it has even decreased! If nothing else, it has certainly gotten harder to install on linux. I think that it is often the case that a user base buys into an idea and funding comes and there is a vision. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as the company actually invests the money into achieving that vision. I mean, lots of people have bought into Tesla's vision, that vision hasn't been achieved yet, it's still mostly just marketing, especially the self driving part, but no one is going to hate them for marketing the vision if they DO succeed, or at least try valiantly.

> it has certainly gotten harder to install on linux.

Downvoted for this. I haven't used docker much but I just did

> yum install docker-ce

and started the service. took me less than 2 mins.

I recently was at a seminar where the lady sitting next to me was a network analyst. Her laptop was running debian and she needed to install docker to be able to work along in the seminar, so she did the logical thing which was to go to docker.com and opened the "Get docker" menu. Under that menu, there are two main options, "Mac" and "Windows". She managed to get down to the "for servers" section and click "debian" at which point she was directed to "download docker from the docker store" at which point she was lost for a while. Then she managed to get to this document https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/docker-ce/... at which point I had to help her, because she didn't know which exact version of debian she was running and didn't know how to find out. I would say it was pretty much a catastrophe, as she spent about half an hour trying to get docker installed.

You ran "yum install docker-ce" you were lucky that you knew the name of the package. I didn't know the name on Fedora, and looking here https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/docker-ce/... didn't help one bit. Indeed, that page doesn't include a line with "yum" in it at all!

Lol. Yes, you customers of mongodb ! You’re all wrong and duped by pretty pictures! If just you could achieve the enlightenment of munk-a ! Lol. I’ve seen this idiotic response from the very beginning days of mongo (I worked there). Marketing at mongo did little more than maniacally focusing on making sure our customers and users where tied into the community and supremely supported on any issue they might have. But go on - keep predicting imminent failure, your sentiment is shared by a lot of people who have never build a company and frankly never will.

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