Cord didn't win. What now?

Summary

Across the last six months, I’ve been making my way through the practical reality of Cord not working out. I was the co-founder and invested more than 4 years of my life in that company. We built some good tech. We built a very strong engineering team. We landed 15,000 commits in a TypeScript/React monorepo. Shipped a command line tool for stacked diffs on GitHub. We memed so damn hard. We had two significant brushes with acquisition. But we didn’t win the game. We also made lots of mistakes and spent loads of time and money on the wrong things, which we didn’t know at the time were the wrong things. We weren’t unique on this front. Most startups spend a bunch of time figuring out what their company isn’t. I’m not going to deep dive into our every shortcoming and misstep in this post. Folks who know me well can probably guess I’ll be enumerating those details again and again for the rest of my days. In this post, I want to keep it lighter and focus on where to go from here. Eventually we had to face the reality that for the amount of money we were spending, the amount of time and energy we’d put in, and the commercial traction we were seeing… it wasn’t really working. We hit some non-trivial ARR numbers (in the territory of $500K), but that wasn’t enough to justify the big team and big expenditures. We also failed more or less entirely on GTM. I’m a product engineer who never aimed to learn about marketing and sales, but I can say I learned a hell of a lot. Sadly, it wasn’t enough. We open sourced Cord and it’s now live and running in many production applications. I’m so proud to say that customers were able to adopt Cord, get the systems up and running, and mostly ignore it because it’s just super stable. Cord engineering was damn good. One of the biggest lessons of Cord is that building great tech isn’t enough if you’re trying to sell software to software companies. You have to solve problems they can’t and/or don’t want to solve. We were constantly faced with pro...