RethinkDB: The Challenge of For-Profit Open Source
Developers among you may be familiar with RethinkDB, an open source database optimized for real-time document storage. Among the many challenges faced by the Rethink team was competing with MongoDB (arguably the leader in JSON document storage) and monetizing a product that was also open source.
Ultimately, RethinkDB was a tool made by engineers without a great marketing or sales strategy. RethinkDB’s post-mortem by Slava Akhmechet says it pretty well:
We had no intuition for products or markets, so we’d go through the motions of building a company without actually understanding what we were doing. What’s more, we had enormous optimism bias…we believed we were immune from the laws of economics and the math of running a business. The math, of course, eventually caught up with us.
