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0 pointspluma9y ago0 comments

RethinkDB didn't fail because any of those things. As far as we can tell without an actual post mortem, it failed because RethinkDB -- the company -- didn't make enough money.

Going by the public information on their website, the only way the company was making money from its product was via support and training.

The problem with making money only with training and support is that it falls flat when the product and documentation are so well done barely anyone considers these things important enough to spend money on them.

Additionally the website doesn't really provide much information on these services other than a contact form. If you're not already in touch with RethinkDB devs, you're probably more likely to ask a local contractor or specialised training company for help instead of reaching out to RethinkDB.

By all appearances, RethinkDB has been pretty successful as an open source project. It has a strong and active community, it is well represented at meetups, conferences and podcasts, it has 16k stars on GitHub (MongoDB has only 10k, MariaDB and MySQL have only 1k each).

But the company was not able to turn any of those numbers into revenue. Downloads, GitHub stars and Twitter mentions don't pay to keep the lights on. A successful open source project does not equal a successful commercial enterprise.

0 comments

scient9y ago

Oh no, more starts on Github than MariaDB? Must be popular then! /s

In all seriousness the OP nailed the issue. The company is not successful because of the "issues" with the product. There is a very direct correlation there, stop trying to make it look like the failure of the company did not have anything to do with the product and that the product is perfect/popular/whatever.

plumaOP9y ago

I knew someone would make fun of GitHub stars eventually, which is why I was hesitant to mention them.

Yes, RethinkDB wasn't more popular than MongoDB or MariaDB. Of course not. But if you followed the JS ecosystem or Hacker News or podcasts or any of the usual suspects it would have seemed that RethinkDB was quite successful for its size.

People talked about RethinkDB. Whenever someone talked about realtime or streaming data, RethinkDB would come up. That RethinkDB felt so ubiquitous despite its low rank in Google trends or even on StackOverflow speaks to how well the team knew how to make themselves heard.

I'm not saying RethinkDB itself is without fail. The most overhyped feature is realtime change feeds and those don't even work for all types of queries (especially aggregates and joins just aren't supported for that). Based on the documentation it also doesn't really sound like change feeds can work at scale.

But RethinkDB certainly managed to catch people's attention. They just couldn't turn that attention into revenue. And considering you actually have to go out of your way to find out how to give them money when looking at their website, that's not surprising.

Even if RethinkDB had been the best thing since sliced bread, it seems like they would have still failed as a company because of this. To put it into online marketing terms: they certainly had the traffic, but they couldn't get any conversions.

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