We signed Mistral AI from a Hacker News post | Hacker News Reader

We signed Mistral AI from a Hacker News post

getlago.com

41 pointsDamDal9614 comments

> Stripe went after Mistral at the same time we spoke with them. But Stripe Billing only works with Stripe Payments, which would’ve meant being locked into Stripe. Lago integrates with Stripe Payments*, which gave Mistral more flexibility if they needed to change vendors in the future.

Funny how a service hiding other services gets hidden behind yet another service.

Seems pretty run of the mill. I can’t think of a good I’ve purchased recently that was made 100% by a single source.

Another thing here is that the open solution ends up being on the top.

This is not something we usually see.

Congrats to them, but posting Mistral’s emails to the company is particularly cringe. But are they just assuming they have permission or did Mistral agree to be a public reference to this extent?

Are you assuming that they are assuming? ;) They may have asked, which is common in this situation.

Do you think this is scalable?

Does it matter? As pg says, startups should Do Things That Don't Scale.

Nope, I don't think so.

We (at FusionAuth) started out the same way, hyperfocused on the needs of bigger customers. It was super helpful, because nothing indicates commitment on both sides in devtools like a customer paying money and a devtool company building out a solution.

It also sharpens the team's intuition about what other customers will pay for, as long as you are aware of the market and competition and other solutions. What you don't want this to lead to is being a consulting company for 1-3 big customers.

Having an OSS or freemium option (as we do, and Lago does) is a great counterweight to customer demand, pulling the devtool company towards community needs.

As you grow, you have more constituencies, and that means that your pool of time to do concierge work for a larger prospect goes down. It doesn't disappear, but it decreases.

While we have a product vision we execute against (and I'm sure Lago does too), pulling work forward based on customer demand is a great way to prioritize pieces of it.

However, the bigger you get, the more competing voices you hear. When you have limited time, do you focus on:

* work needed to land big customers

* work needed to land smaller, self-serve customers

* work to support existing customers

* work to support the community

* strategic work that will pay off in months or years

Some of these categories overlap, of course, and that's what you want. You try to do it all, but you can't do everything you want. You have to build against the vision while also allocating enough time to support current needs.

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