Unvalidated Ideas #055

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

Hosted Gerrit (🗒Raw Notes)

You've heard of GitHub, but you've probably never heard of Gerrit, but big companies have.

Anti-GitHub sentiment along with instability of their platform seems to be at an all-time high:

• HN: Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option
• HN: GitHub incident: ongoing issues with Actions, Issues and other Git operations
• HN: GitHub is down

It's not that Microsoft is doing a bad job managing GitHub -- it just seems to have it's hands full with all the compute required by OpenAI.

Most developers are quite happy with GitHub. This idea isn't aimed at "most developers" though. This idea is niche -- the idea is to target the developers that are excited to use Gerrit.

What you're looking for are the large corp and ex-FAANG developers and teams that know the power of Gerrit -- huge companies like SAP, Google and others use Gerrit extensively and enjoy it.

Don't believe me? Look at the Gerrit conference talks from 2021!. Then look at 2022, which is a bit more muted.

While it might be hard to get those companies off their own hand-rolled versions of Gerrit, this means there's a market out there of people who like using Gerrit, and who use it for their day jobs -- along with that, there is a market for building Gerrit-specific solutions and consulting.

NOTE There are a bunch of places to start finding customers for this -- Gerrit has 700+ stars on GitHub and those people might be great subjects.

Not sure a business like this can work? See the success that is SourceHut. It won't be overnight, but there's a great guide to follow.

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• █████APIs██████ on Heroku
• Hosted Gerrit
• █████████for Developers

Bonus:

• Some accelerators are better than others.

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

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Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

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