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b/c you'll have 1k paying customers sooner or later. if you can't scale, you won't have a viable business. Look, I'm not suggesting to throw away your entire st

by wangii 11y ago

b/c you'll have 1k paying customers sooner or later. if you can't scale, you won't have a viable business. Look, I'm not suggesting to throw away your entire stack. It's very likely that you spend few days, find out the bottle neck and fix it with a scaleable/distributed method. Computing is cheap, and will forever getting cheaper. Paying customers are rare, deserve deep appreciation.

zrail 11y ago
Just sprinkle Distributed Scaling Magic on your servers and voila! Your problems are solved! Nobody is saying scaling out to an additional 1k customers is easy. The great thing about scaling slowly is that you can grow into the problems and address them as they come up. Suddenly doubling your userbase, most of which will ultimately churn out without paying you a dime, and having to deal not only with the technical but also the support ramifications, is a recipe for failure. As the article says.
- wangii 11y ago
  If your app is impossible to scale, then your pricing model isn't aggressive enough. You should have a proper margin to grow your business b/c it'll ultimately benefit your paying customers. If it's not, someone else would happily figure out a way to take care of your customers.
  - zrail 11y ago
    It's not a pricing issue, it's a time issue. Scaling a production application like Baremetrics isn't a turn-key thing. They can't just up the number of dynos or whatever you're thinking it's like. It takes time, time they decided was better spent servicing paying customers and new trial customers, instead of customers that statistically would never pay them. I'm not sure what we're disagreeing on, really. The blog post literally has "failure" in the subject. It was an experiment that didn't turn out well, thus they ended it and are now moving on.
vacri 11y ago
The article explicitly states that they were scaling fine with growth before the freemium event, and it was the sudden surge that was the problem.

by wangii 11y ago

zrail 11y ago

Just sprinkle Distributed Scaling Magic on your servers and voila! Your problems are solved! Nobody is saying scaling out to an additional 1k customers is easy. The great thing about scaling slowly is that you can grow into the problems and address them as they come up. Suddenly doubling your userbase, most of which will ultimately churn out without paying you a dime, and having to deal not only with the technical but also the support ramifications, is a recipe for failure. As the article says.

wangii 11y ago
If your app is impossible to scale, then your pricing model isn't aggressive enough. You should have a proper margin to grow your business b/c it'll ultimately benefit your paying customers. If it's not, someone else would happily figure out a way to take care of your customers.
- zrail 11y ago
  It's not a pricing issue, it's a time issue. Scaling a production application like Baremetrics isn't a turn-key thing. They can't just up the number of dynos or whatever you're thinking it's like. It takes time, time they decided was better spent servicing paying customers and new trial customers, instead of customers that statistically would never pay them. I'm not sure what we're disagreeing on, really. The blog post literally has "failure" in the subject. It was an experiment that didn't turn out well, thus they ended it and are now moving on.

vacri 11y ago

The article explicitly states that they were scaling fine with growth before the freemium event, and it was the sudden surge that was the problem.