Hey this is my story! It's been a genuinely fun year. Looking forward to doing better next time. Datastation/dsq are in a great spot and I'm looking forward to them continuing to grow. Happy for your suggestions and flames.
My main thought midway through your narrative was wondering when you'd realize you're building out a datadog-like tech stack - you mention I think splunk at one point in there at least.
I think a thorough review of datadog and a competitor or two might be interesting for you; the market for 'use SQL for everything' is pretty small. The market for 'use dashboarding tech to read ALL the data' is really very large, and the command line tool you built probably works as middleware.
If I were sitting where you're sitting, I would probably look at two things: could I build a niche datadog competitor with what I've got? If so, you've got really good market comps in public companies and could probably build a pretty great SAAS-model lifestyle business at the very least, which would have value to own, sell, or get investment in for growth.
Second, if I didn't think I could, I would look into selling the CLI-SQL tool in the marketplaces of datadog and so on; their strategy is to allow partners to monetize the customer base by selling tools - this probably wouldn't be a retirement-grade result for you, but I bet the monthly income could significantly beat what you've got so far; those BI tools are expensive, and so incremental charges don't always register, especially if you're bringing new data in the system in a way that was difficult to before. In this case, I'd probably work on a couple quick hits where your tool brought a lot more expressivity to the dashboarding tools. For instance, you can pay extra for log ingestion at datadog, but the tools for dealing with these logs are somewhat limited in the UI. A similarly-priced extension from you that gets better querying might be worth a lot.
At any rate, keep it up, and good luck in the next year!
If you’re determined to be CEO get a CEO mentor and an early sales VP who can do all the interpersonal stuff you find uncomfortable.
If you want to stay in product/dev find a cofounder to be CEO. They are late so cofounder doesn’t necessarily mean 50/50 here. Founder vest.
It’s evident your story needs tuning as “I had a hard time paginating results” is not the real story here nor is it very compelling and just reinforces initial uninformed opinion in the space that you’re only scratching an itch that isn’t market-validated.
What are other people doing with your product? That is the story. This feels like it could be a really big thing.
Congratulations on your work :)
i'd like to suggest you to also build a business
else, you'll end up like countless of other startups and open-source projects that existed for a brief moment but failed due to not making any money
try working on both your business offer and your software offer in tandem
your software product should serve your business, not the other way around
this is the approach i'm using right now for Typosaur (.com)