Comment by rubenfiszel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubenfiszel | Hacker News Reader

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Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2].

Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier. Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been out of reach for a solo founder.

If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help.

[1]: https://windmill.dev

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Windmill looks well done. I've got a few ideas I'm mulling over in the dev tools space and would consider going the solo technical founder. Will definitely reach out for some advice when the time comes. Out of curiosity, any downsides to use the .dev tld?

I would prefer the windmill.com domain but a cool windmill museum has it. I have not seen any downsides except Google (who owns the .tld) kept refusing to approve our oauth because the approval team was convinced that .dev could only be for testing.

Good to know. It works well for products like yours.

Didn't know where to reply, but your docs say "Tested with apache bench. If we did it wrong, let us know."... generally with lambda as a fair shake from 0 to load use provisioned concurrency, and you can always pre-warm it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/provisioned-con...

But cool otherwise. Is JS the only supported language?

Typescript (deno), Python and Go. Tbh the goal is really not to compete with AWS Lambda on performance as they use microvm with hot http servers, but to show that it's not order of magnitudes slower.

Yeah usually the slow part with Lambda is either them loading your container/runtime... or for a long time the P99 on getting the ENI attached into your VPC for vpc lambdas when they have to get a new worker host. They brought that way down and it used to be P90 of like 100ms but p99.9 of something like 17s. I believe that's basically fixed now.

But yeah if you're showing your comparable or same ballpark the criteria is less crucial. Was mainly just adding addtional data. Good luck on the project. A light framework like this for essentially scripts locally without kube or heavy docker is nice.

I know the original windmill (getwindmill.com) is long outdated and abandoned, but it's still too early to reuse names in the same space, IMHO. At least for us old-timers :)

Good luck with the product, but it took me a while to understand that this has nothing to do with the "original" Windmill (it's waay too similar).

There are a lot of tech incubators in the Paris area.

And VCs, but as much as I'd like it to not be the case, the US and the bay area in particular play at another level. The french ecosystem is getting really good at some forms of deep tech, but developer tools is not one of them, yet. The current government and station F have done wonders, we were 8 french startups at YC this year, the most populous of any other EU countries. Things are starting to change in the right direction and french engineers don't lack the drive and talent.

On the other hand, French people/VCs will wonder what can go wrong whereas in the US they look at what can go right. There are enough hurdles to face when trying to build a global tech companies as a solo founder and it can definitely make a difference.

I have spent the last 12 years in the startup ecosystems in US, Europe and Asia.

Europe progressed quite a lot and now can be considered a matured one, however compared to US and sophistication of investors, deal-making and deep-tech it is still a young adult compared to the season 50 years old American veteran with scars and experience.

APAC still a teenager in that sense but with a lot of spotlight.

Different cultures, mentality, support system and also chances of making it in the end. I feel like if you have a possibility to be close to the valley, your chances of making it are probably 50% higher than anywhere else in the world and that route actually makes sense.

Sure but they'll bring you some croissants and half a desk for 3 months for your seed round.

If you're a startup in Europe you can forget about the scale you can experience in the US and you should dedicate someone in your team to apply to every European grant out there to survive.

The successful European founders I know invested the equivalent of a Silicon Valley round of their own money (or friends / family / great contacts from networking) before seeing VCs

Off-topic but have to say OSS Pipedream is something I've wanted to see for so long. Definitely checking that out!

Thanks! and let us know what you think, we are still rapidly iterating (to the point where the landing page and video is quite obsolete)

Hi Ruben!

Great to see Windmill advancements

Congrats on getting into YC!

I’m the Solo Founder of https://atomictessellator.com, also applied to YC this batch

(Actively looking for co-founder), wish me luck!

You don't need one. I certainly wish i didn't, he was a nightmare.

how did you get your first customers?

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