Comment by timsuchanek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timsuchanek | Hacker News Reader

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On the first sight, the moat indeed is shallow. We have a great contact with Cloudflare and Fastly and exchanged our thoughts about exactly this already.

One of them actually recently looked into building their own solution. However, they realized, that in order to create something really valuable, you need at least a couple of months of dedicated engineering efforts of people who really understand GraphQL.

Our automatic and powerful cache invalidation - currently only possible with Fastly, a whole GraphQL-specific Analytics solution and a Security suite is nothing you can quickly clone.

Anyone of course can, but you need a highly GraphQL-specific product with many workflows like CLI workflows to upload your GraphQL Schema etc - it requires quite a bit of thinking and engineering to make that work.

Let me start off by saying, I wish you guys the best and hope my cynicism isn’t taken the wrong way here but reading between the lines… my sense is that there aren’t enough $NET or $FSLY customers asking for this and both companies aren’t interested in staffing a team to dedicate to GraphQL as a result but ARE willing to let you and your specialized team prototype it on their behalf. Not a bad dovetail.

IMO if you get traction, you would be wise to take an early acquisition offer from Fastly or Cf. I was an early double digits engineer at Cloudflare and I can tell you, you REALLY don’t want to build a CDN to try to compete. Love them to death but look at ImgIX as a case study of how not to bizdev this same business model.

Also, don’t entertain the idea that you can compete with a DIY VM-based “Cloud CDN”, it’s really not comparable. Look at the many dead “mobile first” CDN startups of 2014-2018, as case studies.

Lastly, if you guys create a caching query planner on the edge, you might have a head start on a completely unmatched (afaik) product as an intelligent graphQL “gslb”. As a customer, if I can move my user data geographically closer to my users, that’s a big win for many reasons.

Best of luck!

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