Nice! I think this space is growing. There are a few others Im aware off in the space worth checking out: https://julius.ai/, https://cipher42.ai (I've built the early version of this).
We heard of Julius a lot, but did not know about Cipher42, there are a few others folks around. We feel there is a pain and also data teams are a bit abandoned at the moment when it comes to work using AI so makes sense. Curious to get a feedback about your journey building cipher, did you stop working on it?
complementary hitler uses docker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivpCKEiQOQ . but yeah I think infrastructure is hard but at the end it's just a tool for a job, you can use terraform, cdk, pulumi, yoke - the cycle of X for Infrastructure is bad continues :)
This is why we built CloudQuery (https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery) an open source high performance ELT framework powered by Apache Arrow (framework is open source, our connectors closed source). You can run local pipeline and write plugins (extractors) in Go, Python, Javascript and any other language and save data to any destination (files, SQLite, DuckDB, PostgreSQL, ...)
Congrats! What is the business model? Also, I see that the license is permissive which is great but how do you protect yourself from other companies hosting your solution and competing your cloud offering?
Great question! Unlike a pure infrastructure tool (MongoDB, Elastic, Terraform), UI/UX is a critical factor for adopting a SOAR.
Even if other companies fork / host Tracecat, we believe we can out iterate the incumbents in building the best SOAR experience. And I think we are just getting started with UI/UX for AI features in security products. It's definitely not a clippy chatbot...
My cofounder and I wrote every line of code for the frontend, design, data pipeline, docs. I don't think the incumbents can build as quickly and accurately (from customer feedback to implementation) as we can.
I wish you all the best but unfortunately I think you will find out that this business model doesn't work and if you give something for free most companies won't pay for it even if they have the money as it doesn't even worth to go through procurement if it is free. You will have to lock some features in an open core way or other way to paywall companies to pay-up.
Hope Im wrong but I think in the last few years all companies realised that FOSS is not a business model.
Here is a free tip to fix terraform business model (no MBA required):
- Terraform is one of the most valuable tools for IaC - it's all free and it shouldn't - it is not a consumer product, it is not running ads and 99% of the users are business users with money.
- Keep Terraform SDK free and open source, close source plugins, charge per resource.
- Invest much more into Core and plugins.
all forks are doomed with the same destiny, business model is not sustainable with negative margin - as long as you have such a generous free tier and storage can run on S3 the price you can ask for a managed version is incredibly low.
Firstly, congrats :) (Generalized) ingestion is a very hard problem because any abstraction that you come up with will always some limitations where you might need to fallback to writing code and have full access to the 3rd party APIs. But definitely in some cases generalized ingestion is much better then re-writing the same ingestion piece especially for complex connectors. Take a look at CloudQuery (https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery) open source high performance ELT framework powered by Apache Arrow (so you can write plugins in any language). (Maintainer here)
couldn't agree more! I see ingestr more as a common-scenario solution rather than a general solution that solves all cases, kinda like how I treat shell oneliners instead of writing an applicataion in another language. I guess there's space for both approaches.
I'll definitely take a look at CloudQuery, thanks a lot for sharing!
Firstly, Big Kudos if you were able to bootstrap a big business this is very very hard (actually doing this with VC money is also hard). As someone who did both VC funded startup and self-funded (fuzzit.dev acquired by GitLab), I would say doing a self-funded startup even though it sounds good (because you are an underdog and you win on the hardest level if you succeed), a lot of time is really impossible or if possible there is information people are not sharing - for example for self-funded - did you include 300k-600k you had as saving that you used while working on it (or did you consulting while working on it). Did you take loans to grow faster? - the details are really important.
Personally I got to a conclusion that the common ground is a lot of time what makes sense. If you can validate as much as possible before raising the first round, raising reasonable amount of what you need to prove or get to the next milestone and do a lot of first principal thinking that could be better then beiing on each side of the extreme - let's raise as much as possible or Im not taking any VC money because it is all bad. Just my 2 cents but yes if you can grow a business with your own money - then it's amazing - just think this is not possible in a lot of cases and products.
I've done the same (funded and bootstrapped), and most of the conversation about this choice is just stupid.
Engineers cost easily $200k. If you need much functionality before you earn significant money, you simply can't bootstrap. If you don't have founders that can afford to earn very little money for probably 2+ years, you can't bootstrap. Even an inexpensive 4 person eng team, one cs, and some basic office space and marketing/ad spend and all the other stuff a functioning company requires costs a million dollars a year.
Or you need significant ad spend (b2c), or you have midmarket or enterprise buyers who -- quite reasonably -- refuse to buy from a small company unless you can use millions in investment to prove that you aren't going to up and disappear after they spend serious internal effort to implement.
Or -- and this one is particularly painful -- one of your competitors raises, and can suddenly hire many more eng and salespeople, or significantly outspend on ads. That is very difficult to compete with.
These realities foreclose most opportunities to bootstrapping.
You raise good points, and it echoes advice I have given many times — follow the funding path that makes sense for you and your business.
That being said, I do think times are changing. I don't think Obsidian could have been bootstrapped as easily 5 to 10 years ago. The leverage we get from cross-platform frameworks, scalable server architecture, etc, make it possible to stay small. LLMs will even further enhance that leverage for entrepreneurs.
