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Well, it's been an interesting run, but we're shutting down http://DuckTools.com and I'll be departing The Duckbill Group in a month or so. A thread.
For background, I was brought on to try to build DuckTools as a SaaS more or less from the ground up. I was responsible for engineering and ops, of course, but also for product direction, prioritization, customer research, sales - the whole shebang.
That is to say, I was basically building a startup from scratch, and many/most startups fail. With DuckTools, we failed to get something that would meet our needs and our customers' needs at the same time.
Our vision for DuckTools was a set of focused tools to answer specific questions about your AWS spend. We intended to solve expensive pain-points for customers and charge appropriately.
After talking with a lot of customers, we found that the pain-points we could solve cost-effectively weren't worth solving for customers, and the pain-points that were worth solving for customers weren't cost-effective.
For example, "what aws savings plan commit level should I buy?" was a problem we could largely solve. We built a tool that did it well. But to pay the eng costs to maintain it meant we needed to charge more than customers were willing to pay.
For another example, "I can't see overall costs when our org's tagging is inconsistent" was a big problem for a lot of people. The solution is dynamically-generated tags and a full-blown cost exploration UI that uses them. That's too expensive for us to build.
Ultimately, we were running into some hard product problems. We had some strategies to work through them, but they all looked like "hire a small team of devs for 2-5 years until we hit ramen-profitability." You could do that with VC funding, but it's tough while bootstrapping.
I went into this gig knowing that I was hired to build a specific product (DuckTools) and if that product didn't work out, I'd move on with no hard feelings. I'm bummed, of course, but such is business. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I wrote up some reflections on the lessons I learned here if you're interested in a deeper discussion: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/a-duck-tale/
