A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure

This is one of the most fantastic submissions to HN I've seen in a long while. It's relevant in many different ways; it's about a startup, it's about a minimum viable product, it's about untapped market potential, it's about economic success, it's about a jaw-dropping kludgety mother-of-all-hacks, and it offers insights about what matters, both to users in large corporations, and to the author.

And it's funny as hell.

All that technical horror is precisely why it's such a needed and profitable product. That's your barrier to entry.

The only happy ending I see here is if the founders learn to delegate, or work hard on finding the right people to sell this to. Not to a hacker -- to a businessman who would be genuinely happy to run a growing business, and not horrified by the technical kludges.

I always chuckle a little to myself when I see clearly talented programmers shying away from this kind of problem in favor of allegedly more interesting problems. I used to feel the same way. But it's mostly chasing an illusion. The real work of programming is always about dealing with the messiness of the real world.

If you find a problem that doesn't have any real-world nastiness, you can be sure it's either (1) irrelevant, or (2) already solved for free by countless other smart programmers, because it's fun.

This part really resonated with me.

So don't get me wrong. I like Access users. Access developers, in particular, are the anti-IT department, the rebels, the people who aren't willing to wait for the sysadmins to provision them a server, and they don't have to, because they can just share an Access file on the fileserver. IT departments hate them, which is how I know they're on to something. These are the kind of people I want to help. This is the sort of thing that's the reason I do the work that I do. No kidding.

While it feels a little weird hearing that talk in relation to a Microsoft product, I agree. Building and maintaining a successful (To whatever extent you would call such a niche market a "success") product that helps people solve their own problems instead of feeding the IT priesthood would be awesome.

And then when you talk about the implementation details. My smile turns to a horrified slack jaw expression.

I'd probably feel guilty about it, and I might even try to keep it running as long as I could, but I'd eventually have as much as I could take and give up.

    I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated
    user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access
    database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser
    in flash.

If you asked me to describe the glue-code hackery project I would want to work on least in the whole world, I would have come up with something like that. There are probably uglier projects around, but I don't have the creative masochism to think of them.

Nice article.

I had a similar experience with my first company in college selling software to corporate customers who previously used excel to track everything.

Theres millions of opportunities like that to optimize a terribly inefficient corporate process with software.

But the problem is always

a) the problem set is rarely easily reproduced, meaning you're not really selling a product, but instead selling a product + consulting - since every process is slightly unique

and

b) you're dealing with terribly inefficient systems and the type people who would put together a terribly inefficient system (like you said, not necessarily meaning they are bad people but likely are not a good customer)

I still believe its the most straightforward way to make money in software outside of getting a job at Google/facebook. But its certainly not fun and not a traditional "high growth" startup.

A fantastic read - thanks. Quite simply I'd hire someone to do the dirty work, pay them a decent salary and split the remainder of the income between you and your co-founder.

Google for the following phrase to find the site: "Run unmodified Access applications, right inside a web browser."

(Edited to remove link to not affect Google juice)

Sounds to me like you're good at creating software small-businesses, but you're not built for the tedium of running them.

I find it's often hard to discuss the business of software because of a variety of preconceptions people in the field have so let's turn this into a restaurant. You wanted to start an amazing new french restaurant, but to get started initially you decided you're going to be more of a cafe where costs are lower and it's easier to attract customers. In that cafe you start offering a few sandwiches, and some baked goods. Some of your baked goods were vegan. Soon you were inundated with vegans seeking baked goods, and you basically turned your whole operation into a pretty successful self-sustainable single-store vegan bakery. This wasn't the french restaurant you wanted to start (and could have sold to a restauranteur as some do once they show promise), nor is it a true "startup" success which would have had you opening in many cities, perhaps franchising, etc.

Nevertheless, you were to able to create a business (as you've done before), direct it into a market where you're not just making a profit, you're solving a true need. I don't know if it would help your self-fulfillment (because it sounds like you're lamenting the lack of it), but that's the aspect I would concentrate on, and just be aware that it is more likely than not that you'll get bored or disgusted with what you've created and move on to the next part. Just work out an efficient way to do this "moving on" portion, and I think you'd be able to do something you love and something you're good at. And in a few more of these, perhaps you'll create that one company that'll be your baby, not just your creation. (The trick is of course to treat them all as your baby at first)

It is a beautiful illustration of how just making money is not worth it for some people.

Loved it, thanks for sharing.

How about trying to sell the company to http://www.red-gate.com, who IIRC built most of their business on making tools to deal with the awful parts of database systems?

It sounds like the plight of one of my coworkers. He started on a team that had to know significant details about how dial up worked. This was great work when dial up was big. One aspect to dial up were fax calls, and nobody wanted to work those issues. He stepped up, learned fax, and earned quite a bit of notoriety due to his specific fax knowledge. Wrote a book, some RFCs, promotions, etc.

The only problem? He 10 years later he still sits around fax machines, listens to users who still use faxes (problem customers), and talks about one of the true dragging edges of technology. And it doesn't port well to other newer technologies.

If I were you, I would hire a good entrepreneurial hacker who's looking for some autonomy and upside, give him/her 20% and a small salary, and leave me and my partner on the board.

Now if only there was a way to convert those Access databases into modern web apps based on MySQL and an HTML interface, that could really be a cash cow...

Your story sounds like a classic reason people sell small businesses: not excited about it anymore. Either figure out how to get excited again (perhaps by hiring people who like to do the parts you don't like), or sell the business to somebody who can be excited about it.

I feel the same way about cross-browser testing. Everybody knows that this is the worst part about web development. A number of startups already exist to solve it, but there's easily room for more solutions. This is a blindingly obvious startup idea.

But I get indigestion just thinking about it, because this means taking on the worst aspects of everyone else's job. There's no major win that I can offer for being clever, just for being more willing to focus on unpleasantness.

Or am I kidding myself? Is that focus on something unpleasant the very soul of entrepreneurship?

Sometimes you luck out, and something that everybody hates is something that you love. But there are some things which are probably universally unpleasant to even think about.

Why not try and sell the company?

There are people who would love a revenue stream and don't mind boring work. People who would rather be in a position to work in Thailand, or India, for example...

    > Customers need this so badly that they're willing to pay a lot for it.

    > It's just about providing something people want and are willing to pay for.

Truth.

As for your problem, I'd recommend open-sourcing the code and stepping away if you really can't stand it anymore.

I shuddered when I saw the word Access Database. (bad memories of porting those evil things). I don't care how much money is in those things, I will leave it to someone else :) Much like these guys are trying to do.

That is quite amazing. I am writing this as someone who has just rewritten an Access piece of crap for a construction company. I charged them $15k for 4-5 months of part time work. It is not a rewrite of their original app, it is an order of magnitude better, but if they saw your git versioning WINE running frankenstein, i wonder if they would have chosen that. Now i am off to sell this software again now that i have been paid to write it once. I wonder if you could get a nice income stream by referring companies who want to upgrade their application slowly. Now I am living in the USA, if I lived in another country I could take that $15k and live for 1 year. Here it is hardly much at all. I would love to take US jobs for $15k and finish them in 2-3 months. Low end US freelancer rates, but do a high quality job.

Sounds like a valuable contribution that increases the value of MS Access for its users by allowing it to become accessible for web-based applications. I'm searching for the company website that he did not want to mention in the article (if that says anything).

Great ideas alone do not make great entrepreneurs or profitable companies. At the end of the day, the way a person thinks is where they will eventually return. An employee can have a great idea and make an attempt at being an "entrepreneur" for a while only in the end to return to being an employee. Entrepreneurs think differently about how money is generated from someone with the mind of an employee- thinking on different sides of the quadrant. It takes a different set of skills and a different mindset. "Safe & secure" can be alluring.

What would I do? Delegate the care and feeding of this beast to two hires and get a marketing guy to continue the push for new business/deals. In short: hire up until I had outsourced all of the objectionable aspects of the technology to someone else. YMMV.

How about value adds and referrals? Seems your company has no google juice. I did a few google searches and didn't find your because the term 'web hosting' is so SEM'ed to death. In order to compensate you could offer referral bonuses. It seems a lot of people would want your technology but talk to regular hosting companies. I wonder if you could get money that way. As for value adds, what about regular backups? People don't know about your git backed system, you could charge them for regular offsite backups. Any congrats on a good business.

Ha! Awesome! There is nothing more satisfying than doing something "successful", hating it and leaving it behind (well, if you really don't like it). It's like a beautiful, perfect counterpoint to all the success-oriented, soul-sucking, BORING corporate-speak we hear so much of.

Of course, one could adopt a more practical self-improvement oriented outlook and say, well, someone with a talent for figuring out what people need (or stumbling on it) would surely come up with something even better that you'd like doing, but hey, just enjoy your liberation.

Wow. That was the longest "do ONLY what you love, here's why" article ever.

Assuming it makes enough money... why not just hire someone else to maintain it? As long as you're very careful about your documentation, even a pile of hacks like that could be interesting to work on.

"They are up to something" Never saw it from that perspective (working in a company running at least one too much Access app). Got me to rethink my quite fundamental possition on that. Yes, that actaully is a huge business opportunity, one you could eexpand upon. And yes, I can completly understand why you don't want it anymore. My answer to the last question: Do everything you can to get that pharma deal and maybe another one and then sell it!

If you're going to do something you don't want to do, just get a job. It's less risky, and usually better paid than a startup.

Starting a company is about working on something you're passionate about. I couldn't imagine starting something that wasn't really meaningful to me.

"Most small business owners don't own their own business, they own their own job." (paraphrasing The E-Myth Revisited)

My POV is this person needs to start delegating as much of the business as possible and manage growing the business to support that.

Why don't they just keep increasing the price to insane levels and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

http://eqldata.com I knew it!

Did anyone figure out what is the company behind it?

Dude, just charge more. like 5x 10x more.

This is an incredible piece. Brutally honest, and I can absolutely see myself in the author's shoes.

This is the Moby Dick of blog posts. Incredibly boring, but that's the point: he's illustrating how boring his startup was, so he quit, just as HM illustrated the monotony of whaling by making Moby Dick beautifully written but unreadable.

Still, I hated reading it, and I didn't mind MD.

> "That is, C is little more than a portable assembly language."

I know it's not really the point, but this is a pet peeve. No, C is nothing like assembly language. I seriously question whether anyone who repeats that frequently has actually done any assembly programming. It's an order of magnitude more tedious than writing C.

Failure is rambling on and on, tangentializing without purpose or value, puking endless stream ofwords mostly devoid of meaning.

Learn to get to the point, man!