Show HN: We've open-sourced our bootstrapped startup, ShareLaTeX
Published in 2014, this chronicle by @jpallen details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 276 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 79 comments
Just tested this out with a 150 page document split across several folders; it compiled quickly and I really like the way you display the logs and warnings. Looks great! And I really appreciate your making it opensource.
Integrating this with github a la travis-ci would be great, obviously one would need to be able to make commits to the repository too; I'm not sure if it would be great enough that it would induce people to start paying for the service if they weren't already, though... although I'd sure like it.
I'm not sure what sort of use-cases you are seeing already, but this seems most useful to me personally for last-minute edits to coauthored papers & grant proposals right before submission. Nailing down the final version can be a real pain in the ass.
A few other minor observations:
* uploading a zip file didn't work, but I'm on an old version of RHEL and made the zip with Ark, so... who knows
* after accidentally drag and dropping a bunch of .bbl, .log, .toc (etc) files, I didn't see a way to delete more than one file at a time, or how to undo a file deletion.
* I also couldn't figure out how to move a file from a subdirectory to the top level directory
Thank you for open-sourcing this! At the moment I'm using sharelatex to keep a version of all my equations "alive" since every time someone tries to resave my word documents, the equations become rendered to images.
Unfortunately for me, Latex hasn't gained traction in our department. I think the main barriers to entry, for our lab at least, are:
1) Local installation is more difficult than installing Word. Sharelatex and other cloud-latex solutions solve this.
2) Word's comment and review tracking system is more intuitive. If you're reading a document electronically and want to insert a comment or make an edit in word, you just do it right there. With latex, you can use synclatex to go back and forth but this extra step is actually a non-insignificant barrier. Also, with latex, is there a way to make and see comments in the pdf/preview but have the comment also live somewhere in the source, AND have the comments be editable in both places? I suspect the answer is yes, but I just haven't found the right tool?
I haven't unlocked the "history" feature in sharelatex but does it come close to this?
This looks excellent. I'll certainly try it for my next paper and will see if I can lobby our university to pay for the hosted version.
I'm assuming universities are what you are aiming for? I think you should focus on CSy departments.
Could also target conferences/journals i.e. allow them to offer access to the hosted version for people collaborating on a paper for that journal/conference.
From a business development POV, I think it would make sense to wade through university pages and collect departments that offer Latex-Templates to their students as potential contacts.
It's really great to see perpetual interest in collaboration on LaTeX documents. I hope you have great success (not sure I have a use for it now but will keep you in mind if I ever do). I also expect to recommend it.
Unfortunately a lot of my own documents are really hard to handle with editors -- I tend to write very long documents split across multiple source documents in a tree for easy management. I wonder if there is room in an offering like this for something more like an online IDE rather than just a editor for a singular file.
I'm really excited by this. I've been a big fan of ShareLaTeX and teach a LaTeX class at my local Hackerspace for EE/CE students at the Universities near Cincinnati and I always use ShareLaTeX in our class as an easy way of getting started without needing to install TeXLive on your system. This allows me to run our own version of the service at the Hackerspace -- nothing sucks more than trying to teach an online class when 25 Engineering-heavy students are using the 5M Down Internet connection...