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**Paul Biggar:** For sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think we're on the same page there. Let's talk about what it feels like then. Let's put me in your core user demographic. I'm building my startup on Dark, and I have a SaaS startup that I wanna build. What should I expect in terms of business model? How much am I gonna pay you? How does it scale? |
I have no problem paying for things that bring me value. Where I have a problem is usually when their model doesn't scale alongside the way that I use it, for example. GitHub used to famously have this mismatch with agencies where I was a freelancer... I would add new projects all the time, because that's the way that ... |
**Paul Biggar:** Oh yeah, I remember that. |
**Jerod Santo:** But they would charge based on project count, and it's like, I'm still just a one-person company. It's not scaling with my company. So I'm curious -- I know you're not there yet, you're in private beta, but you love things about business models. Surely, you have some sort of a gameplan, like "What does... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, so the belief the I have about developer tools is that people used to not pay for developer tools. This was a truism up until about 2015 or so. And before that, those of us who monetized developer tools, such as CircleCI, did it by reselling infrastructure. And if you think of AWS as a developer ... |
We have described Dark -- and Dark isn't there, but conceptually, Dark is an infrastructure compiler; it's a thing which takes the code that you write and figures out how to run it... And we will charge you a reasonable upsell on the actual cloud costs of the thing there. |
However, a thing that I've been thinking about recently is that the vast, vast majority of our users today and for the next few years are people who are not using it very much, and they're not using it an amount that really costs that much money. |
If you think about a typical SaaS, a typical SaaS is a workflow engine that has few users and not a lot of data. It's not Twitter, it's not Snapchat. So if you're charging people based on the costs, there's not a lot of money for the size of businesses that Dark is gonna be able to support the next few years. |
\[48:14\] So I think long-term that is a good business model, and short-term I think we're gonna need something else. And the thing that I'm thinking is something like the per-user thing for companies; because if you're spending 10k a month on an engineer, you're not gonna balk at $25/month to make that engineer three ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. \[unintelligible 00:48:47.01\] |
**Paul Biggar:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You can't just be like "Hey, by the way, we're gonna start/switch on this new language we've never used, on a new editor we've never used, on an infrastructure we've never tested. Where do I put my credit card in?" |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. I think that most people who try Dark will end up at a free forever sort of thing. They won't be using enough traffic to hit costs. They will be writing in public, in the open, packages, and that sort of thing, and that will be free for the amount that they're using... And then at some point corp... |
You said you don't mind paying for tools... Most companies have no problem at all paying for tools, and actually prefer to pay for tools, so that will definitely be where the pricing goes. |
I remember Jim Lindenbaum, who's the Heroku founder, has this concept of like "Don't put anything that's developer-facing behind a paywall. So you can put the business-facing things behind the paywall, but not the developer-facing things. That's an approach that I really like, and that I intend to stick to. |
**Jerod Santo:** I like that idea. So what does success look like for Dark? If you teleport yourself into the indefinite future, and like "I did it. Dark wins. Dark is successful" - what does that future look like? |
**Paul Biggar:** That's kind of interesting, because we're sort of at an inflection point now... We haven't mentioned it yet on this show, but there was a layoff in July, and Dark is just me right now. So I'm having to think about what is the future of Dark, what is the future of this company... And obviously, the orig... |
So I don't know what the future looks like. I think I need to sort it out in my own head for where I want the future to be. But the main thing that I love is what you can do with Dark. And whether Dark is gonna be a thing where you build apps for tens of thousands of people, or for tens of millions of people - those ar... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. Well, I appreciate the honesty around the size of the team, and all that... I didn't realize it was just down to you... But hey, the pandemic hit a lot of us in different ways, and like you said, we are living in difficult times... So I'm happy to see it continue with you. |
Do you have -- I know there's a public roadmap, but like you said, you've got some thinking to do... But do you have like a "I'm gonna work on it for this long", or the vision, or how long are you in the game with Dark? |
**Paul Biggar:** \[51:59\] My thinking is I might be in it forever. I'm not 100% sure. Because startups tend to be like "I put in everything I have for four years or ten years or whatever", and then you burn out, and have a mid-life crisis... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. You've already played that game though... |
**Paul Biggar:** I've played that game, yeah, and that game went well, and so now I'm in the post-game. And Dark is, to a certain extent, my post-game. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Paul Biggar:** So Dark is a codebase I know very well... I love coding. There's something in me that's like "I can build Dark forever", and that would be wonderful. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Paul Biggar:** And there's another part of me that's like "Build a big startup success etc." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Paul Biggar:** And those two are a little bit in conflict. It's like the devil on each shoulder. And that's why I was saying earlier, I don't know which one I'm gonna go, which devil is gonna win. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Well, let me just sit on one of your shoulders and just reiterate what you said to me - work on what's most exciting to you. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's where you are; you're in a good spot, you can afford to do that... So if you focus on that, versus having to decide "Go big or go home", it's like "Well, wake up each day, work on what's exciting", and that would be at least exciting. At the very least enjoyable. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. The situation that we're in as a company - the company is separate from the product or the code. We haven't got to product-market fit yet. We have a million in the bank. We've spent about four million to get here. And we basically have to get to product-market fit on that million. And we're spend... |
So then there's the question of "What is the best way to get to a place where there's optionality? When we get to product-market fit, does Dark start to take off? Are we excited by that take-off?" Then that kind of points in one direction. |
On the other hand, it's possible that when we get to product-market fit Dark will still be a thing for small people to build things with a small team, and that will be another reality that we have to deal with. When we have that information, I think it'll be clearer. That sort of information about what options you have... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Well, for the tinkerers out there, the experimental folk, the ones who do not like to marshal and unmarshal data inside databases, you wanna try out Dark. It looks like it's in private beta at the moment... |
**Paul Biggar:** It's in public beta at the moment. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's in public beta now. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So you can just go sign up... |
**Paul Biggar:** You can just go to the website, DarkLang.com, sign up, try it out. |
**Jerod Santo:** Give it a shot. Hop in the -- it looks like you have a community that you can hop into, ask questions... Source-available, so you can do your habitual GitHub complaining/requesting of things, like you would with an open source project. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. There are GitHub issues, and pull requests accepted. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. Paul, anything else I didn't ask you, or you've just been waiting to say this, or ask that before we call it a show? |
**Paul Biggar:** Nothing comes to mind. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Thanks again to John for requesting this episode. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, thank you, John. This is wonderful. |
**Jerod Santo:** This was lots of fun. I'm fascinated; I would love to see you succeed, and we'll definitely be keeping our eye on Dark, and we encourage all listeners to go out there and give it a look. It has a lot of interesting properties... And something at the very least you wanna try out and see if you like havi... |
**Paul Biggar:** Thanks so much, Jerod. |
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