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Off the top of my head... 1. Talk/show your user growth. 2. Blog about how you're all working full-time. 3. Hiring people. Usually (at least in self-funded c

Off the top of my head... 1. Talk/show your user growth. 2. Blog about how you're all working full-time. 3. Hiring people. Usually (at least in self-funded companies) the more people you've got the healthier you are. 4. Talk about your server infrastructure and about how you just upgraded your servers / added more servers to keep up with the "amazing growth". 5. Be active on your blog. Talk up about your plans for the next year. If you've got plans for the next year... you're probably not going anywhere. 6. Keep producing updates to your product. Nothing shows the health of your company like continuing to release updates.

lsc 17y ago
Hm. I suppose it depends on who your users are. None of those things would convince me of your stability. My thought is that usually, the faster a business expands, the greater chance it has of overstepping itself and failing. For example, until now, my costs have been such that if I fuck up and loose revenue, I can pay for operating costs by getting a full time contracting gig. (I've been expanding, and I'm rapidly approaching the point where this is no longer the case. But there have been many times during the last five years when I have fucked it up and I have needed to rent myself out to pay for it.) In other words, going full time prematurely almost killed my business, several times. I mean, I'm full-time now, but as far as stability of the business goes, me being full time adds quite a lot of risk. (It adds upside, too; I can get a lot more done, but it means that I have less room to pay for mistakes.) Thinking more about this, I think part of the disconnect between what you say and what I think is that I am running a business that is in large part reselling services I rent from others. (well, I rent power and data center space, and then I buy servers, install software, and rent out a portion of the CPU/RAM/etc... but by far my biggest cost is power and data center space. I almost spend that much on hardware every month too, but that is only because I am growing. over the 3 year lifespan of a server, the power it consumes will exceed it's original purchase price, at least when it comes to what I pay for hardware and what I pay for power. ) The difference is in likely failure modes. If you have a webapp you can run on a single server (an 8 core/32GiB ram server is gonna cost north of $2K to buy, but you can host it for under $150/month, and 32GiB ram/8 cores can handle rather a lot of users.) you really only go out of business when you get tired of it. most people can support the $150/month server indefinitely, even if there is not any money coming in. On the other hand, uh, my hosting costs are large enough that if there was no money coming in, well, I'd need to get a contracting gig fast. As long as the webapp guy is making plans for next year, there probably will be a next year. On the other hand, the guy with the high overhead is likely going to relax when things are going well, and is likely to plan hardest when he can see failure.

lsc 17y ago

Hm. I suppose it depends on who your users are. None of those things would convince me of your stability. My thought is that usually, the faster a business expands, the greater chance it has of overstepping itself and failing. For example, until now, my costs have been such that if I fuck up and loose revenue, I can pay for operating costs by getting a full time contracting gig. (I've been expanding, and I'm rapidly approaching the point where this is no longer the case. But there have been many times during the last five years when I have fucked it up and I have needed to rent myself out to pay for it.) In other words, going full time prematurely almost killed my business, several times. I mean, I'm full-time now, but as far as stability of the business goes, me being full time adds quite a lot of risk. (It adds upside, too; I can get a lot more done, but it means that I have less room to pay for mistakes.) Thinking more about this, I think part of the disconnect between what you say and what I think is that I am running a business that is in large part reselling services I rent from others. (well, I rent power and data center space, and then I buy servers, install software, and rent out a portion of the CPU/RAM/etc... but by far my biggest cost is power and data center space. I almost spend that much on hardware every month too, but that is only because I am growing. over the 3 year lifespan of a server, the power it consumes will exceed it's original purchase price, at least when it comes to what I pay for hardware and what I pay for power. ) The difference is in likely failure modes. If you have a webapp you can run on a single server (an 8 core/32GiB ram server is gonna cost north of $2K to buy, but you can host it for under $150/month, and 32GiB ram/8 cores can handle rather a lot of users.) you really only go out of business when you get tired of it. most people can support the $150/month server indefinitely, even if there is not any money coming in. On the other hand, uh, my hosting costs are large enough that if there was no money coming in, well, I'd need to get a contracting gig fast. As long as the webapp guy is making plans for next year, there probably will be a next year. On the other hand, the guy with the high overhead is likely going to relax when things are going well, and is likely to plan hardest when he can see failure.