That amount of funding should not be hard to come by. Several people on HN, in fact, fund projects of that sort of size (< $10K). If the worst comes to the wors

That amount of funding should not be hard to come by. Several people on HN, in fact, fund projects of that sort of size (< $10K). If the worst comes to the worst soft launch, blog about your needs and then see what comes :) (my gut instinct is you could probably get by on cloud hosting that is a lot cheaper - and which scales with demand - at least initially; but you know your product) The key takeaway: none of these are unsolvable problems. Startups have come to the market on shakier grounds and succeed.