I remember Steve from my days working on Eve, he was part of that community and always a big proponent of end-user programming. I was happy to see him working on this project but am not surprised it's shutting down.

Nothing to to do with the quality of Val Town, but making a business in this space is really, really hard. You can't start the business without raising millions (Eve raised $2M, Darklang raised $3.5M, Val Town raised $7M), but it's hard to scale out a proof of concept in the time investors want to start seeing an ROI. It seems to me about 2-3 years is all you get for seed runway, when realistically projects like this should take at minimum 5 years incubating. Darklang extended their runway to ~7-8 years by firing all the devs and keeping just the founder on life support. Ultimately even that wasn't enough.

But maybe with AI this could work, I dunno.

What's required to make it all work is a fundamental leap in programming interface design, but the business side doesn't look any different from a typical SaaS. So unless you hit the ball out of the park you're entering the market with an experimental product, then you have to deal with product-market fit even if you have the right product, so you really only have one shot.

It's very hard to go back to investors and ask for another round of funding when there's no discernable market and the product isn't gaining the traction investors would like to see.

Anyway, kudos to Steve for fighting the good fight! What would really be great is to read an in-depth post mortem on the project. Looking forward to it if you have time!

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swyx 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It seems to me about 2-3 years is all you get for seed runway, when realistically projects like this should take at minimum 5 years incubating.

measuring things by years is not really first principles thinking. i think the reality is that end user programming looks a lot more like notion than it is like valtown.

	▲	bwilliams18 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		the only successful example of end user programming is Excel. start there and work backwards.

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drekipus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why bother with investing, why not just build it small and sustainable to begin with?

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unshavedyak 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That was my question. The little i understood of ValTown seemed like a sustainable, small business. No need for it to get huge. As long as it doesn't require hosting cheaper than customers would be wiling to pay. Given the type of services you could probably multi-tenant the boxes quite heavily and predictably (lots of crons you understand, etc).

I didn't look at it closely, but everything i saw looked like a great small business. VC money seems confusing, i must be missing a lot.

	▲	bombcar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If you're in the "vc-world" a small business is hard to wrap your brain around; it's an entirely different think and thing.

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anewhnaccount2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that's what's he's cooking now: https://github.com/mech-lang I still keep checking on it. There were a lot of great ideas in Eve.

	▲	grimgrin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To be clear, the "he" is not Steve, but the parent poster. Maybe obvious, wasn't to me 8)

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jamessb an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

In this case, I think VC investment was essentially required because the idea for Val Town originally came from a VC (Dan Levine), rather than a founder - see 9.04ish onwards from the interview with Steve Krouse: https://puckacademy.substack.com/p/steve-krouse-on-val-towns...

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dzonga 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

good on steve & team for tryin'. brutal market & yeah a postmortem is needed.

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necrodome 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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