I’m working on a specialized data store[1] that would be perfect for this kind of use case (large “cold” storage with indexing). But I’m having trouble finding potential customers. I’ve tried Google search ads but got 99% spam and 1% potential investors, but 0% potential customers. If anybody has any ideas I’m all ears.
Most places I've worked we couldn't even consider using a product that wasn't supported by a major cloud provider like this. What problem does your product solve that customers absolutely 100% need it?
Structurally, you are a small entity trying to compete on cost with hyper scalar cloud providers and open source software. Most ISVs like you charge a ton of money for big problems very few enterprise customers have.
I think you need to find a specific use case where your product is a clear winner. Like 'HaystackDB is the best option for healthcare exchanges to use when receiving claims'.
This is a good summary of why I’m hesitant to put more work into it.
The counter argument I guess is that developing your own data store in-house should be even more of a no-no, and companies do that. (One example is obviously Uber, but my previous employer is another example.)
Do you think the option to self-host the product would help tip the scale?
> What problem does your product solve that customers absolutely 100% need it?
To be blunt there is no such problem: you can always throw more money e.g. at DynamoDB. But if you have a very write intensive workload (such as the use-case described in the OP), then you can save 90% of that money.
You need to be doing enterprise sales not marketing. There is a lot of advice here and in general on that but you definitely need to be making calls with that type of business.
Yep nobody with the problem you’re offering to solve is going to solve it by googling and picking some random company they’ve never heard of with no track record.
The companies that have these types of problems all have AWS reps (or whatever vendor) that get first crack at a solution, even if their senior engineers or CTOs do some googling. Frequently discounts can be negotiated on products that aren’t a perfect fit, or companies will get early access to new products that solve their problem (AWS calls this “limited preview”).
A good chunk of B2B infrastructure products like this are developed using a “golden partner” model. The first customer (or few) gets a free or reduced cost license, the developer gets a real-world scenario with real data to use to figure out what the minimal functionality actually is to be a marketable product and to work out bugs. This arrangement frequently requires a preexisting relationship and trust between both parties.
Yep. Always a bit dangerous to go up against AWS and similar. My hope here is that this product is too niche for the major cloud vendors to invest in. But since Uber is building stuff themselves that assumption may be wrong.
A “golden partner” model makes a lot of sense, thanks.
If you know a technology leader at a company that has this problem, reach out and ask if they’ve had any pain related to it. Ask to take them out to lunch and tell them about a solution you’ve been working out. Or even a short demo call. See if they’d be interested in an “innovation partnership.” You give them a discounted/free license (can be time limited to a year or however long it takes to validate that your solution works and saves them money - then returns to full-price), they agree to feature prominently in your marketing material or provide a reference for your next lead.
>When I’m on the other side of the table I do that
No, you don't. There are many established storage solutions out there. If you're in the market for one, you can easily fill days, weeks or months vetting those. So, why would you bother dealing with a sales rep from a random one you never heard of before, and isn't used by anyone. You don't even provide any details on what makes it different or better from anything else out there.
Well the reason I’m working on this in the first place is that when I was on the other side of the table I was looking for one. I filled in the contact forms of a couple of different startups that had products somewhat in line with what I was looking for, and talked to their sales reps. Admittedly they weren’t as early stage as my project, but on the other hand they weren’t 100% focused on my use-case either.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was hoping that someone with a write intensive workload would want to spend some time evaluating a product built specifically for that. But perhaps I’m wrong? Even if your workload was 99% writes you’d rather go to some established player (e.g. MongoDB) with a product optimized for 50/50 read/write?
>I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was hoping that someone with a write intensive workload would want to spend some time evaluating a product built specifically for that.
Again, it's not clear to me exactly what it is you're doing that's any different from the plethora of existing off-the-shelf solutions.
You're saying that you started this project/company because you were looking for a solution to a specific use case (write-intensive workloads) and existing options didn't work - can you expand on that? Can you create a chart, for example, that lists out the specific things that Haystackdb does and alternatives don't? Presumably, if you optimize for write-intensive workloads, there are some drawbacks when it comes to reads - no? Or maybe storage? That's good to highlight.
What you need are whitepapers/blog posts/youtube videos/talks at conferences/etc. that highlight the technical details of your solution, because you're trying to get technical people interested in your product to the point where they will invest time to learn more.
Well, it’s pretty simple: HaystackDB is designed from the ground up for write intensive workloads, so it’s much more economical than existing off-shelf-solutions for that type of workload. Is that not clear from the landing page?
From pricing: “$0.2 per million writes, $20 per million reads”. The typical cost profile is $2 per million read/writes, or even more for writes.
Forgive me because what follows will sound harsh, but I think you need to hear it based on your response.
> HaystackDB is designed from the ground up for write intensive workloads
Okay.
> so it’s much more economical than existing off-shelf-solutions for that type of workload.
That's a leap in logic. Just because you designed it with this workload in mind, well, doesn't automatically mean that it's any good for this workload (or any workload). If solving a problem was as easy as declaring "I will design my solution from the ground up for this problem", then we'd all live in peace and harmony. So that's what people are asking you here: how do you make your DB "much more economical" for that type of workload? What technology, what ideas have you had to make it possible? If you don't want to reveal that, then you need proof that it's better than the competition, not a declaration, that it's better than the competition.
> Is that not clear from the landing page?
It's clear that you want to market your solution as something good for write-heavy workloads. Why should we believe you've done a good job designing your solution?
> From pricing: “$0.2 per million writes, $20 per million reads”. The typical cost profile is $2 per million read/writes, or even more for writes.
Who knows how you came up with pricing? Perhaps you're betting on your customers being stupid and not realizing that taking a 10x hit on the price of reads will lose them (and earn you) more money in the long run. After all, what good is writing to a DB if you never read from it...? Or perhaps it's some kind of promotional / loss leader pricing that will change soon in the future. In any case, it's, again, not proof that your solution is adapted to the customer's problem.
> Forgive me because what follows will sound harsh, but I think you need to hear it based on your response.
No worries. I appreciate you taking the time.
> you need proof that it's better than the competition, not a declaration, that it's better than the competition
Fair point. I realize I’ll need that before making any sales. But I was hoping to get a few leads from the contact form without it.
> Perhaps you're betting on your customers being stupid and not realizing that taking a 10x hit on the price of reads will lose them (and earn you) more money in the long run. After all, what good is writing to a DB if you never read from it...?
No it’s not a malicious trick. There are use-cases where most records will never be read back. For example, if you go into the Uber app you can find a history of all your trips and you can click one and bring up a receipt for it. Most users will rarely if ever do that. So you end up writing many more receipts to your database than what you’ll ever retrieve.
The marketing byline you have on your landing page is clear enough, but nobody will take that seriously without a deeper technical description.
When I read it, I assumed you wrote some code to move data in and out of lower-cost S3 or Glacier storage tiers because you don't control storage pricing and you run on top of existing public cloud infrastructure. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong - but if I'm looking for a solution, I need to assess whether I should invest time and effort to do a deeper dive, and that's the box I would put you in, without any more detail.
With a disclaimer that I have no formal nor practical background in marketing, here are some ideas:
1. It is a bit unclear to me when I would use Haystack. The main advantage seems to be cost cutting. It would be nice to see some realized examples of this.
2. When competing for price, you may look like the cheap, and thereby untrusted alternative. There is a risky business paradox here, for which I am sure a fellow HN poster will supply the name: you charge less, therefore you make less, and you will not be able to sustain the service, making me not want to spend money.
3. Have you tried looking for companies that may actually need this solution? Have you tried contacting them directly?
2. True. One reason I haven’t priced it ridiculously cheap is to avoid this judgement, and fate. With this pricing I won’t necessarily have a smaller profit margin than competitors. The cost advantage comes from a smarter architecture. Any ideas on how I can communicate that would be greatly appreciated.
3. I used to work for one that needed it. I’ve also interviewed at one that had the same problem. A bit hesitant to reach out to potential customers though before I have a solid product I can deliver. But perhaps I shouldn’t be?
> 3. I used to work for one that needed it. I’ve also interviewed at one that had the same problem. A bit hesitant to reach out to potential customers though before I have a solid product I can deliver. But perhaps I shouldn’t be?
Companies generally have to be suffering pretty badly to take a risk on changing their tech stack to something unproven. And the risk for you at that point is that they choose to spend 10x on consultants to implement some existing system instead.
The CTO needs to trade off the opportunity cost of developing new features/existing maintenance against integrating an unproven product. How can you de-risk this for them? (Even just showing that you recognize that this is the case can help)
Maybe this is a time to "do things that don't scale". ie: offer to integrate it into their system for them (for at least some small part/pain point), and likely in parallel so that they can evaluate it without taking down the existing system.
One observation I have regarding your homepage is that the message isn't very clear. The headline doesn't mention any benefits I get from using your software.
I think you should invest some time into improving your landing page and maybe you may see some traction. A good resource for this which I've bookmarked is here(1). Hope that helps.
Thanks. So you think it would work better if it would just say “save money”, rather than jump straight into the “what”?
To me, when I read the below, that just screams “save money”. But maybe I should do that conversation for the reader so to speak?
From benefits box: “Sometimes you need to index a huge amount of data, to accelerate just a few search queries. But building indexes and keeping them in hot storage can be expensive. HaystackDB builds only the indexes needed for sub-second query latency, across billions of keys, while keeping all your data in low-cost object storage like S3.”
The market is saturated with storage products, so it's tough to differentiate yourself. Your site does not help by the way. You're also not selling an end-user product to the public, rather you're selling a technical and infrastructure solution to very technical people - that's a different type of sale. To get those people interested, you must put together technical whitepapers/blog posts/webinars/youtube videos/etc. to explain your approach.
To consider your product an alternative I'd like to see benchmarks that seem trustworthy, something like a Jepsen analysis or case studies at existing customers, and be able to test it within the EU, i.e. not on US:ian services.
Seems you're in the vicinity of Lund, should be a 'science park' or similar close to the uni where you can find companies that have problems you could solve. Talk to 'incubators', 'accelerators' and the like there.
The homepage could benefit from more tangible examples, because right now I can't discern where it fits into my current stack. For most companies, it would be replacing something in a specific context.
Like a side-by-side example. Doing "work" on BigTable (show code examples) versus doing the same "work" on Haystack. Then show the specific metrics on how Haystack is cheaper/faster/better.
The idea is that it should be about a tenth of the cost compared to S3 or DynamoDB. Is that not how you read the pricing? Or do you just think that’s still too expensive?
EDIT: Or maybe it’s because reads are expensive? That’s a consequence of the write optimization. The idea is that potential customers will be doing 90%+ writes.
Perhaps. But I have a feeling it’s too late once they’ve started building something in-house. Any ideas on how I could find the ones that will publish an article like this one year from now? That’s the ones I’m after, I think.
I would seriously consider an open source business model with an appropriate licensing model. I see lot of companies are open to experimenting with open source db's.
Good point. I’m thinking about releasing an open source (or source available) “frontend” for it, and just charge for the “cold storage backend”. How would you feel about that?
Quite frankly, this is not gonna work. I manage a system with a very write-heavy workload (lots of small writes) and even though our writes far outpace our reads, this pricing makes your system about ten times more expensive than an RDS cluster.
There's no data about performance. There's no information on how or whether data is persisted to durable storage before a write is acknowledged. There's not even any information on how big keys or values can be. There's no public information on support.
When choosing a system like yours, my priorities are:
1. Data safety
2. Performance
3. Cost
... In that order. You've done nothing to educate me on 1 and 2 and your pricing isn't better than what you're seeking to displace.
When your product is a tool for developers, show up with hard facts about your product. Zero people (as you've seen) are even remotely interested in building a product on top of a system without knowing whether the system will hold up to their use case. And other than a very anemic FAQ section, you have no documentation at all, whatsoever.
All valid points. I guess I’m hesitant to put time into documentation and similar, if I can’t somehow find a steady stream of sales prospects.
> even though our writes far outpace our reads, this pricing makes your system about ten times more expensive than an RDS cluster
That indeed sounds off… Are you sure you’re comparing the total cost to that of an RDS cluster? I am aware that reads will be more expensive (due to the write optimization), but I was hoping most customers would make it back on cheap writes. Also the storage itself ($0.23 per GB-month) should be much cheaper than RDS.
My total database is maybe 400 gigs. Most of the writes overwrite existing data, so storage cost isn't a concern. With the cost of an upfront RI for the year on RDS (with basically as many iops as I can use), your solution gives me ~100 million reads. That's...like a month of usage at best.
At least I'm my case, the fundamental problem you're facing is that reads are just too expensive. Writes and reads tend to grow at the same pace in many products: there's a ratio that tends to stay the same as you scale. $20/million reads is just a _lot_. The ratio of writes to reads for your pricing needs to be 100:1 or more for it to make sense for me, but I'm more like 10-20:1.
> I guess I’m hesitant to put time into documentation and similar, if I can’t somehow find a steady stream of sales prospects.
This is part of why a database company is hard to build. You will simply not find anyone willing to give you money, because the alternative is going to be a solution your customers already know and understand and which is likely extremely mature. You're competing with Postgres and Mongo. You can't ship a database product that doesn't work: you're asking people to build on you for their storage primitive. If you fuck up, that's a business-ending event for your customer. You've either got to come to the table with an extremely compelling product ("I couldn't build my business without this") or you've got to show why someone should trust you over an established but somewhat more expensive alternative.
You might be surprised how often a deep graph of microservices ends up rereading the same prior transactions over the course of stateful payment processing and on-demand payouts. DynamoDB can give you 2.6 million short reads of base load (1 RCU/s provisioned) for $0.12 per month, which would make a $65 alternative (2.6 * $5 + 2.6 * $20) a hard sell.
Typically you have a “hot-cold” architecture where transactions stay in “hot” storage for a number of days (I think 12 days in the OP if I remember correctly), then are moved to “cold” storage. HaystackDB is primarily designed for the “cold” portion of that architecture. But I am considering adding an open source / source available “frontend” that would provide low-cost “hot” storage.
Besides all the other good feedback here, I will offer my extremely petty reason why I wouldn't spend much time evaluating this product. In the FAQ, under the "Are transactions fully ACID?" heading, there is a typo: "simultaineously". It gives me the impression that not enough care has gone into an important part of this product. I know it's not a fair jugdgement, but first impressions matter.
would love to see snowflake like paper. I am not sure if you are targetting enterprise sales or trying to woo developers who can advocate for your product in their companies. If you are targeting latter, Its unlikely that developers are going to fill a contact us form to try out your product.
1. https://www.haystackdb.dev/