After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code.

by Dylan Huang on November 25, 2024

And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous scripts, deployment configurations, marketing website, and more. Hopefully the codebase is interesting or potentially helpful to somebody out there!

The Startup​

Konfig was a developer tools startup focused on making API integrations easier. We started in late 2022 with the mission of simplifying how developers work with APIs by providing better tooling around SDK generation, documentation, and testing.

Our main product was an SDK Generator that could take any OpenAPI specification and generate high-quality client libraries in multiple programming languages. We expanded this with additional tools for API documentation and interactive API testing environments.

While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. It was too difficult to get potential customers to sign contracts with us and that price points were too low despite the demonstrably ROI. We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business.

Despite the outcome, we're proud of the technology we built and believe our work could be helpful for others. That's why we're open-sourcing our entire codebase.

The Repo​

Here is the public GitHub repo. I'm releasing it exactly as it was when we shut down—no cleanup, no polishing, no modifications. This is our startup's codebase in its true, unfiltered form.

The Products​

In the past 3 years, we built 4 main products.

1. SDK Generator
2. Markdown and OpenAPI Documentation
3. API Demos (Markdown Based Jupyter Notebooks)
4. SDKs for Public APIs

Random Things​

And lots of miscellaneous things:

1. Shell script for generating cold outbound message
2. Programmatic SEO Scripting
3. References to live customer deployments and pre-sales artifacts
4. Marketing website
5. Product Documentation
6. Modified Changeset Bot - Supports our custom monorepo setup
7. SDK Generator Integration Tests using Earthly
8. Python Code Formatting Service
9. AI Pivot Experimentation
10. render.com deployment configuration - render.yaml
11. API Documentation Generator Tool using LLMs/HTMX/Django
12. Custom Notion Database Integration
13. Python script for cropping blog post images

Thank You​

I want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who supported us on this journey. To our investors who believed in our vision and backed us financially, thank you for taking a chance on us. To our customers who trusted us with their business and provided invaluable feedback, you helped shape our products and understanding of the market. And to Eddie and Anh-Tuan, my incredible teammates—thank you for your dedication, hard work, and partnership through all the ups and downs. Your contributions made this startup journey not just possible, but truly meaningful and worthwhile.

Looking back to March 2022 when I left my job to pursue this startup full-time, I have absolutely no regrets. I knew the risks—that failure was a very real possibility—but I also knew I had to take this chance. Today, even as we close this chapter, I'm grateful for the failure because it has taught me more than success ever could. The experience has been transformative, showing me what I'm capable of and what I still need to learn.

As for what's next, I'm excited to explore new opportunities, see where the job market thinks I fit (haha), and continue learning and growing. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll take another shot at building something of my own. But for now, I'm thankful for the journey, the lessons learned, and the relationships built. This experience has been invaluable, and I'm grateful for everyone involved.