Comment by kjksf

Comment by kjksf 12 hours ago

51 replies

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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.

quesera 11 hours ago

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.

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  • catwell 11 hours ago

    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.

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    • oblio 7 hours ago

      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.

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      • mtlynch 7 hours ago

        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.

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        • oblio 7 hours ago

          Thank you for the translation from "person-in-the-know" to "clueless-bystander" :-D

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      • Vinnl 7 hours ago

        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.

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  • diggan 11 hours ago

    > 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.

    Reply View 14 replies
    • DrillShopper 11 hours ago

      What hosting providers would you recommend?

      Reply View 5 replies
      • diggan 10 hours ago

        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)

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    • thelittleone 10 hours ago

      Dont OVH and Hetzner offer this? If you dont like bare metal perhaps run Coolify for your vercel like platform?

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    • quesera 11 hours ago

      All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of data sitting in Pivotal.

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      • diggan 10 hours ago

        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).

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      • dugmartin 7 hours ago

        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.

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  • nbardy 4 hours ago

    Dude billing never a problem. People wanting to pay you is the point of a business

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  • ghaff 10 hours ago

    Developers mostly won't pay out of their own pocket.

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  • dangus 10 hours ago

    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.

    Reply View 11 replies
    • dangrossman 9 hours ago

      "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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • dangus 8 hours ago

        If solo developers could make enterprise-grade work management systems we’d sure have a lot more of them around.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • kelnos 7 hours ago

          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.

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    • hinkley 9 hours ago

      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.

      Reply View 7 replies
      • elwebmaster 7 hours ago

        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.

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egorfine 11 hours ago

The biggest risk: people are going to flock to Linear, which is the next best thing.

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  • regularfry 11 hours ago

    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.

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    • j45 10 hours ago

      Totally, naysayers may be trying to eliminate all risk in something by a secret idea no one has done.

      When in reality, there is no risk free anything.

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  • rozap 10 hours ago

    It's been wild to see linear get clunky and slow over the last year or two.

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jmartin2683 6 hours ago

It just went out of business for… reasons. There are better tools out there nowadays, apparently. Why emulate a sunken ship?

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anonymoushn 12 hours ago

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.

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  • aantix 12 hours ago

    If anyone is making a clone, feel free to reach out to me. jim.jones1@gmail.com

    Previous user of Pivotal Tracker - I'll tell you everything that I loved and hated about it.

    I know a couple other devout users as well that I could introduce you to.

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    • digitaltrees 11 hours ago

      I’ll reach out. I am planning to build it for my company

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  • ericpauley 12 hours ago

    Most people probably have a PT account lying around or can find a friend with one. I just checked and my account from 6+ years ago is still active.

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jph 8 hours ago

Great idea! If you're reading this and want to connect about a clone, I'm joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.

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j45 10 hours ago

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.

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mvdtnz 7 hours ago

> 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.

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