Hacker News Reader

Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

Even if this only accomplished one-way directional sync with backup and disaster recovery capabilities, it'd probably find a 10x wider audience.

View on HN

Thanks for the comment - are you saying that one-way sync has a 10x wider audience than two-way syncs?

Without knowing the target market, I'm thinking the taxonomy of "two-way sync" is understood by a very narrow community. ISVs have been using this approach for years. So maybe that's the audience?

If so, then Heroku connect probably does need an alternative.

A business user (non-technical 10x audience) just wants to sleep at night knowing their daily backup was successful and they have recovery capabilities on-demand.

There are unicorn scale companies in this space (such as https://www.owndata.com/). And Salesforce is getting back into the backup game.

Gotcha, that makes sense. From our perspective, the one-way sync market (backups and ETL/rETL) was already saturated with heavily-capitalized players who were hitting each other hard with marketing dollars. We didn't feel that we had a unique insight with one-way syncs, but did feel like we'd come across something unique with two-way use cases.

So we decided to double down in this smaller, underserved area for now as we try to build something people love, even if it's a bit niche.

That being said, there probably is room in the backup space for challengers against the incumbents - it's a massive market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com