HACKER Q&A
📣 lnkdinsuxs

What can we learn from HashiCorp's failure?


As startup entrepreneurs, product market fit is our holy grail. Terraform, packer, vagrant and vault achieved tremendous success. Consul, Nomad and Waypoint weren't shabby either.

At my company, the pricing of the Hashicorp Enterprise licenses were insane and the cloud offerings didn't provide the features I needed. In retrospect, I'm lucky I didn't go all into the hashistack - the insane pricing just forced me use other products, but it makes me wonder:

Could Hashicorp have done a few things differently so the stock wouldn't have tanked right after IPO and kept going down until it got bought out?


  👤 lnkdinsuxs Accepted Answer ✓
One possibility could be that they actually never achieved product market fit: They went viral with their free offering, but those were just users not customers.

1. When it came time to pay, they actually didn't have many customers.

2. The price-points at which they were selling licenses at meant customers would need to be among the Fortune 5000: their sales cycles are long, complicated and expensive


👤 xyzzy123
They could have IPO'd for less money ;) Then they wouldn't have needed to squeeze so hard.