Readit NewsWe have been using Apache ECharts in our products[1] since 2020.
Cannot recommend it enough - absolutely fantastic library, great documentation, zero issues of any impact to us in five years.
My only wish is for the keyboard accessibility ticket[2] to get some love!
My co-founder uses the phrase minimal-viable-company for maximum-viable-product.
We bootstrapped for 5 years to well over $1M+ ARR before recently closing a seed round[1], Clojure played a large part in our ability to deliver as a small team. Also in our general happiness as programmers, it is a nice language to work in.
We will grow our Clojure core product team over the next couple of years, but mostly the funding round is about balancing our business to keep up with our product delivery.
Clojure has been very good to me (I had 15 years on the JVM prior to moving to clj/cljs in 2013-ish). YMMV.
[1] https://factorhouse.io/blog/articles/from-bootstrap-to-black...
Congratulations on building something great!
It is immensely satisfying to build something that you believe in and succeed in selling it. I founded my company in 2019 and my experiencing and motivations in bootstrapping mirror yours.
We are in year 4 (commercials) and 6 (product development) at Factor House[1].
We build enterprise tooling for streaming systems (Apache Kafka and Apache Flink mostly). Selling software to enterprise customers is different from B2C as the sales cycles can be endless and most likely your cashflow might be more lumpy, but at the end of the day it's a very powerful thing to be profitable and independent.
As @yevpats points out sometimes the bootstrapping story does miss some details, in our case we invested roughly $500k to get through the pre-commercial period, to achieve that we sold our house (my wife is also my co-founder). Not everyone can, or is mad enough, to commit resources at that early stage. To be honest we were quite mad.
Prior to starting product development with Factor House we ran a consultancy that delivered systems for enterprise customers based on Kafka, Storm, Cassandra, etc - so we had plenty of experience. We also had consultancy customers who were eager to use the pre-commercial versions of our product and provide feedback.
I also run a meetup[2] in my hometown that specialises in programming solutions with distributed systems.
Last year we took a small amount of funding from Lighter Capital (non-dilutive, fairly simple loan terms) to unlock some growth.
Bootstrapping is hard, but my interactions with VC left me with the impression that it's a low-information lottery for the benefit of those who already have capital.
It seemed clear that if we took funding we would rapidly lose control of our vision and we don't need to 100x our business to achieve our goals. I would rather focus on delivery for our users and avoid adopting manic ideas to pay off 99 failed lottery tickets.
https://factorhouse.io/kpow/
An enterprise toolkit for Apache Kafka (and now another for Flink).
I spent years working in large enterprise orgs, a few more working with distributed systems. Along the way I picked up Clojure and by the power of greyskull managed to combine all those factors into a company. Now I work with a small team shipping tools for programmers. Good times.
Today we have users in 100+ countries, but it started off as something I needed for myself / my team when working on client projects.
Question from an Australian(ish) here.
If you Americans buy a house with an 8% mortgage today, can you remortgage in the future if/when the rate drops. Is the buy-out penalty of remortgaging somehow higher than just selling / repurchasing?
Do people get locked into higher mortgage rates for long periods of time that are uncompetitive is my question. Is there a significant downside? Is 30-year fixed normal in the states?
30-year fixed rates don't exist in Australia. You'll get a 5 year fixed rate from ~6% or so, that's about it.
Is your product available yet? I would be glad to try it out!
Yes, sure is! https://kpow.io/
You can get started with the Community Edition for free, it includes our JQ implementation (we call it kJQ - https://docs.kpow.io/features/data-inspect/kjq-filters)
Just shout if you need any help.
This is great, JQ is brilliant.
I love JQ so much we implemented a subset of JQ in Clojure so that our users could use it to munge/filter data in our product (JVM and browser based Kafka tooling). One of the most fun coding pieces I've done, though I am a bit odd and I love writing grammars (big shoutout to Instaparse![1]).
I learned through my implementation that JQ is a LISP-2[2] which surprised me as it didn't feel obvious from the grammar.
[1] https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse
[2] https://github.com/jqlang/jq/wiki/jq-Language-Description#:~....
d_t_w commented on Meaningful exits for founders (2016) medium.com/strong-words/m... · Posted by u/freediver
We have been able to bootstrap Aha! from zero to over $100 million in annual revenue without any external funding. We have written about some of our experiences at https://www.bootstrap.company/ and https://www.aha.io/blog/collection/bootstrap-movement.
I run a bootstrapped software company, not at the $100M scale.
My interest piqued I clicked, had a look at Aha! (having never heard of it before) and immediately thought - hey I could use this. You got me, ka pai, haha.
Any insight on how to navigate inflexion points that seemingly require more capital that cashflow allows? Stay true and spend less? Number 8 wire might not be the same solution today as it once was, that's my worry.
HSX and RFX are drop-replacements for Reagent and Re-Frame, allowing us to migrate to React 19 while maintaining a familiar developer experience with Hiccup and similar data-driven event model.