I was quite surprised to see the acquisition! I think they never found PMF because they pivoted upmarket and were trying to do too many things.
Even though I'm not a customer of June, I've always rooted for them from the sidelines. They were a different kind of YC company; these days, you only see AI slop companies coming out of YC.
Seems like the founders lost hope in it and probably sold it to Amplitude to have a soft landing instead of a complete crash and burn. Since both are YC companies, i think this was an internal nudge towards a sale. But can't say for sure, i think the founders will share what truly happened in a few years once they're contract expires. Anyways, good luck to the founders!
I came across this guy last week when I was learning about implementing basic lighting in shaders and Phong lighting is the starter for that. So I looked him up and what a tragic story.
I was quite skeptical of this. I've seen another company claiming to do the 3d generation do the same with their demos, they outsourced the "3d generation" part to low-wage workers in 3rd world countries and claimed the models to be generated by AI. I see this as a future trend to get investor money and do the rug pull.
That is me with mubi! I keep paying but I rarely watch any films. I find that I need to be in the right headspace to watch any serious stuff but when I do, I do watch a couple of them and I don't really mind paying. I like to joke that I'm their ideal customer haha.
Unlike netflix where I downgraded my plan to the lowest tier, there's literally nothing on it and they also keep on cancelling good tv shows. I think they should focus on serious stuff and work with more indie directors. But then again I can't blame them because they're just following the trend.
I understand why dev tools business are hard, i'm just curious as to what makes them hard? I know one of the things that make it a difficult sell is that devs don't buy much but what else?
1. You are trying to sell software to someone that often loves writing software themselves.
2. You often can't convince them that they could NOT recreate your product easily. They will pick a tiny subset of functionality and say "oh I whipped up this demo that does 90% of what we need last week".
3. They don't care about the maintenance cost of self-written. In some cases that's their job security.
4. Even if it makes them 50% more productive, their hours or pay won't change.
This is why the "best" products are often in boring areas OR have a unique platform advantage. Think of paypal/stripe.
Another big factor is that devs know that startups can (and, as in this case, will) go out of business, so they’d rather go with an FOSS offering that can’t just disappear with two months to transition off of the platform.
