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!
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.
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.
Steve and Tom also individually have some of the best blogs out on the web.
I wish them all the best with whatever comes next. I'm pretty sure they'll all do great things.
We're still figuring things out and this announcement is yet another data point about the simplified infra for devs space maybe not being very promising but most of our customers at the moment are actually non-technical teams who have struggled to use anything else. You could argue in some ways Val Town was tangentially in the same space as Lovable & Co and those companies are still going strong.
I think there's real signal in this announcement but it's also hard to derive general lessons for a whole market from a single company given how many variables come into play.
I fear this is the reality of anything built around Deno after the Cloudflare acquisition. Thankfully agents are capable of handling most of the migration of the apps that everyone has built on top of it.
For anyone looking for a new home for their projects, I'm the founder of Easel.sh [0], an app hosting platform. I've been putting together migration guides covering how to move workloads from Val Town onto Easel. It's not a drop-in replacement for everything Val Town offered, but I think we can be a good fit for quite a few use cases.
I'm happy to personally help anyone who is looking to migrate.
[0]: https://www.easel.sh
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the code in February when they open source it.
I remember one of the silly little services I built on Val Town getting DDoS’d and knocking Val Town offline for a short time. Steve sent me a handwritten note and a Val Town baseball cap thanking me for helping them improve their defences. Class act.
I'm sorry to hear this didn't work out for him, but there's no doubt that he'll get the next one (or maybe the one after that).