It's interesting that you choose Instagram - a highly successful company/product - as an example to warn people against. It may be harder to come up with examp

It's interesting that you choose Instagram - a highly successful company/product - as an example to warn people against. It may be harder to come up with examples of people who failed, for the obvious reason - they failed and are therefore not well known, but I really don't find the statement that Instagram "nearly lost it all" very compelling. Did they? Really? If they had had even more problems scaling, would they really have lost users? Look at Twitter, they took years to resolve issues. I actually think the importance of stability and uptime are overblown in the early stages. If I think about the times downtime has significantly impacted my view of a company or product, it's when large established services I'd come to rely on professionally went down. You need to establish a reputation for reliability before most people expect it of you. That's not to say it's not important, but you need to look at context. Noone relies on Instagram minute by minute for their professional work, so the priorities are different. UX, marketing, network effects, etc. are going to trump stability.