Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team.
People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning!
I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions.
And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.
I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are
Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.
Not GP but a rewrite based on what I think they mean:
Maciej knew Delicious inside out, and he knew what Delicious being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard (a Delicious alternative) in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring Delicious for $35k in 2017.
I think Maciej worked at Delicious, which then got acquired by Yahoo. He then created Pinboard as a Delicious competitor, while Yahoo ran Delicious into the ground (as he predicted). Then when Delicious users had flocked to Pinboard, he acquired Delicious from Yahoo.
> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist)
Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high requirement.
I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal, but lets assume 10% just in case? Lets say that's 100TB in total (on disk), which you could host with 10x storage boxes from Hetzner, 24 EUR each per month, so 240 EUR in total, which includes 10 unmetered connections (1 per box).
> I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal...
I do. You might not have demands to migrate all data from all of your potential customers, but far, far more people than you might expect treat their issue tracking system as a system of record and external memory for a HUGE assortment of things.
One hugely (and obviously) useful query chain that such a system answers is "Hey, this customer problem sounds familiar. Did we investigate it before? Did we solve it? If so, how? If not, why not?". For long-running projects, it is impossible to select the correct 10% of data to retain to also retain the ability to reliably -er- service those query chains.
Obviously I meant 10% of all customers would hypothetically migrate from Pivotal to this new imaginary service, not that 10% of the data from each customer would be migrated... So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base, pretty generous assumptions I think.
Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.
> So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base...
Yeah, maybe. I don't know how large the slice of the Pivotal Tracker userbase you'd be able to retain even if you had a perfect clone. I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be... it's my understanding that it has some pretty rabid fans that used it.
> Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.
Sorry about that, I think I assumed some familiarity with moving data around/migrations, and moving 10% of a customers data around from a legacy service to new service wouldn't make much sense in that context.
> I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be
I think being able to capture 10% of existing users is already a very large guess, realistically it would be closer to 1%.
But, without any numbers from Pivotal and actually trying to launch a cloned service, all we can do is guess :)
> ...I think I assumed some familiarity with moving data around/migrations...
I am familiar with this sort of thing, yes.
I'm also professionally familiar with people who seem to think that it's totally acceptable to obligate folks to throw away large fractions of their valuable historical data in the name of cost savings. "Surely you can identify the most valuable 10% of your data!" they say.
Given that I don't know you and what you know, and given that I've encountered a shockingly high number of these fools with a fetish for data destruction, I chose to expect the worst from your somewhat-ambiguous statement... which would ensure that at least one of us learned something, regardless of the truth of the situation.
> I chose to expect the worst from your somewhat-ambiguous statement
Yeah, I noticed that too. Not that my feelings are hurt or anything, but you might end up in friendlier and more productive discussions if you try to stick to the HN guidelines, which includes:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> ...you might end up in friendlier and more productive discussions...
Was this discussion unfriendly?
As for discussion productivity: I know that -historically- I've spent TONS of time going round in circles because of unexamined incorrect assumptions that crop up when both sides "steelman" the others' arguments, rather than speaking plainly, clearly, and politely about what they believe their conversation partner to have said. "Steelmanning" can be an acceptable backup strategy, but -IME- speaking clearly and plainly is the strongly preferred strategy between conversational partners who can remain civil.
I assume folks can remain civil in the face of polite questioning and assertion, and switch strategies if it turns out that they can't. To do it in the reverse order is just much, much slower and error-prone.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says ... [a]ssume good faith.
Thing is, that was the strongest plausible interpretation of what you said. I assumed that you were making totally good-faith statements based on your background and structured my reply to be both polite and gather the most information reasonably possible about which of the totally plausible backgrounds you were speaking from with the fewest round trips. Had I not done this, and had you actually been one of those fools who revels in data destruction, we would likely have gone several rounds in mutual misunderstanding, rather than the half-round of solo confusion terminated by your reply that immediately cleared up the misunderstanding.
Anyway... if you have a couple of (6+) free months, you should TOTALLY clone Pivotal Tracker. IMO, the two HARD, HARD parts will be to replicate its ability to work offline, and its ability to integrate incoming changes from the server with unsaved changes on the client. Whoever wrote the data handling system for that program did a really, really, really good job.
> Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.
I dunno, that felt obvious to me. Both the idea that you’d somehow manage to get all customers to migrate to your new service, as well as that they’d migrate only 10% of their data sound preposterous.
> ...as well as that they’d migrate only 10% of their data sound preposterous.
Ah, I might be unduly affected by some big data (not Big Data, mind you) migrations that I'm currently involved in, where the Powers That Be are telling us that we have to throw away a huge fraction of our historical data. Well, that and the many times we've had to fight beancounters who popped on by to demand we save the company what amounts to pocket change by throwing away tons of historical data.
(It's flabbergasting how beancounters tend to ignore the price of programmer time when making their cost-cutting spreadsheets.)
It might not be as much as one would think. I just looked at their export page and you can only get 6 months of project history data out of their system - I'm guessing that means comments.
Both OVH and Hetzner offers unmetered connections for their dedicated servers, only had good experience with both so far (besides when one of OVH's data centers burned down, but hoping that was a exceptional situation)
Backup to Backblaze B2, or, depending on architecture, rely on their object storage for hot data (depending on data cache and tier requirements). They partner with Cloudflare for free egress (on the Backblaze side) of public content as well.
Cloudflare’s subscription agreement for self-serve accounts limits serving non-HTML content, including "video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content."
Which seems to be a fine fit for a project management SaaS solution. If you have an origin with non text content, you can front it with Fastly or pay Cloudflare something enterprisey (which you should be able to do once you have traction). Regardless, this is an inexpensive content distribution and object storage architecture available vs AWS egress costs.
I'm fairly sure Hetzner only host their dedicated from Germany or Finland, yeah. But OVH has dedicated servers in Europe, America and Asia if I recall correctly.
The real reason this won’t work is that Pivotal obviously isn’t making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it down.
If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down.
An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive.
Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the product, but that number was declining.
"Good money" to a company with $13B revenue a year is a lot different than "good money" to a solo developer. If you can pick up six figures a year in revenue and keep things small enough to run solo, it's a good business for you.
Why? Maybe the market just isn't there for that many work management systems. Or maybe it's not a fun and exciting product to create, so a solo developer isn't as likely to pick it up.
Remember we're not talking about the general case here. We're specifically talking about the feasibility of seeing a specific product being shut down, and then building a clone of it on a small resource budget in an attempt to snatch up their soon-to-be-former customers.
I’ve worked at a couple places that made the mistake of thinking they could charge a premium for artisanal hand crafted web pages. You get all the customers with deep seated control issues, willing to pay a premium to have everything exactly how they like it, and one by one sticker shock works as therapy and the price they will pay per artisanal, hand crafted webpage slowly declines until it costs you more to run the system than the customers will pay.
And in the most recent case of this I’m aware of, at least two different groups got to sell the company to new suckers before the bill came due.
Can you please elaborate more on this? Price they will pay for changes? Not getting it, is it that the target market is slow forcing owners to lower the price? Doesn’t explain “costs more to run” part.
To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion.
If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for the same url based on context and previous activity, then I have to generate it every time ("hand crafted, artisanal web pages") so the weight of the backend is now proportional to traffic.
Amazon.com tries to split the difference. You and I see the same bones of a page for an Apple Watch 10, but little bits load in and show you laundry detergent and me pickles. But Amazon makes more money every time I click on pickles and add to my cart, so there's an expectation that the fractional penny they pay to load the page fragment results in more sales. That doesn't work the same for SaaS applications, so you need to use even this trick sparingly, not build your whole product value statement around it.
For the control issues crack, the paying customer (not their users) is attracted by all the levers and dials, but cannot appreciate the cost using them exposes them to. The development cost can amortize over time, increasing your profit margins and letting you recoup the R&D costs, but the cost of keeping a cluster running cannot. And you've painted yourself into a requirements corner you can't get out of. Eventually their eye drifts to competitors with fewer high-cost, high-value features in favor of low-cost.
Thanks for explaining and I am sure you have more experience with this type of scale but wouldn’t you say that ChatGPT is an example of “hand crafted artisanal page”, where not only every person sees a different answer but every interaction with the page results a different response. Of course they have a ton of VC money to burn but could it be that technology optimization (especially on the backend and hosting provider) could be the solution to this cost issue as opposed to blaming product features?
I suspect that ChatGPT is more expensive per page view than most and likely all of the dead projects I have worked on, yes. Some of my friends and colleagues would say the same, but I’m sure I can find someone who has worked on a larger pile of cash being used as firewood. Customers will become more price sensitive over time as the hype cycle runs its course. If they can’t aggressively cut costs without losing customers those lines will cross and they will go bankrupt.
What you write seems very interesting, but I'm afraid I'm not fully grasping it. There are few immediate counter examples I can give, and I wonder if I'm missing a point and those are not really counter examples.
Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about Atlassian suite?
I don't know if Gmail could be standalone company, but it surely must be economically viable to run. Proton is a standalone company. Office 365 could probably be a company. But I'm not arguing against you, I'm trying to understand what you say because it seems to be interesting. Also, like you mentioned on a sibling comment, when the cost of showing a page is at current OpenAI level, the feasibility of making profit out of it is highly doubtable.
Does showing different snippets of existing texts for each user,and providing sorting and searching functionality is highly customized in a way that will usually be too costly on the backend to make viable money?
> It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone
The core product is relatively simple. But software packages like Pivotal aren't sold on their core functionality, they are sold on their value-adds like integrations, automations etc which take much longer and much more manpower to build.
You don't need to capture all of them, just enough to get to profitability. That might be a very small number, for the right minimal viable replacement.
I've built a bunch of web apps for big companies, and I love the hell out of Pivotal Tracker and am crushed that it is gone. I immediately fired up my editor and took some exports from my pivotal tracker account and am working on building a data model to import them into and move from there to the UI.
The base product is pretty straight forward, but there is a lot of nuance to how some things have developed in it.
I will likely not capture everything in an MVP, and I am wondering if there are some key pieces that might be not thought of for an MVP, but you absolutely love about Pivotal Tracker that would be sorely missed in a new product trying to fill it's nitch.
I also see some things that could be broadened and improved that are common in other project trackers. What are some thing you feel pivotal tracker was missing that really made it a difficult sell in businesses?
Feel free to comment on this thread your feedback. I'll be watching it, and also, if any other competitors want to lock horns on developing it, they can have at your feedback too!
This genuinely is an opportunity as you're saying lol
As someone who's built and launched something this big in a few months once upon a time, it feels like way too many technologies, it increases cycle time in ideation land.
This would need to just be a postgres server, extended maybe by things like hasura and supabase, and a single codebase front end for all platforms. If postgres can't do it, don't do it.
Front end... might be flutter. Could be svelte.
Still, being a polyglot agnostic, for the dollar, in speed of development and more importantly iteration, per feature or update, in not needing to create an entire build, environment, nothing really seems to be as complete or as fast as Laravel, as much as it can shock to hear (I am not a heavy user, but considering it).
Different strokes though, its just about speed of iteration.
Given that it's impossible to sign up, it looks like most prospective cloners will have to learn all the features by watching videos and learn about the exported CSV format by asking former customers for their CSVs.
This happened when Mint shut down and a lot of other companies started advertising themselves as a Mint alternative. I'm building something similar too for my own needs (but open source, self host able); sadly it's still very early on so I didn't quite catch the migration wave.
People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.