We got jobs at PlanetScale

tl;dr Travis and I both got jobs at PlanetScale, building a rad cloud MySQL product.

Travis and I tried all sorts of things both marketing and product to try to breathe life into the stagnant business that was Substrate in the post-consulting era. Different marketing tactics. Customer development for a second product. Shopping for an acqui-hire. Nothing worked. I went into a little more detail about those final months in the announcement that Source & Binary had ceased operations.

I considered restarting the consulting practice but that wasn’t of any interest to Travis. And since we wanted to keep working together that wasn’t a very long conversation.

The most realistic thing we did was talk to a lot of companies about jobs. There were some hits and some misses. Some had a job for one of us but not the other. Some were good businesses with uninteresting challenges.

We found a home at PlanetScale among old friends and new friends.

Before we started talking to them, before we’d even thrown in the towel on the Substrate business, PlanetScale made a very public change to their strategy. They got rid of their free plan, revamped their sales strategy with a much smaller team, and charted a path to profitability. I thought this was great.

When we started talking about joining PlanetScale the lack of a free plan and the focus on profitability – on building a sustainable business – was right at the top of the list of “pros.”

I also knew that I wanted to work somewhere large enough to have functioning sales and marketing. They’re the parts of startups I enjoy the least and do the worst. I’m so happy to have dope coworkers who are great at sales and marketing, right down to the minimalist let-it-speak-for-itself marketing site.

What I didn’t know until I got here is that I missed having excessive quantities of MySQL in my life. It’s good to be back.

This article is part of a series on Source & Binary, my company that operated from 2020 through 2024.