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I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this per

I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this perspective is wrong, or more precisely, focusing on this type of optimization will make your business less likely to succeed. The problem is ROI, $227 a month adds up to $2724 a year, which, assuming you're in the US (or similar cost of living area), is just such a small sum of money, relative to even just living expenses, that even spending time thinking about it, let alone actually using less efficient solutions, is going to negatively impact your business's chances of success. I say this as someone who is really drawn to optimizing out these expenses. So I don't want it to be true, but I truly believe focusing on these types of costs lowers my businesses chances of success.

chiefalchemist 7y ago
Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation. Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?
fizixer 7y ago
Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile. You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".
- CalChris 7y ago
  My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.
Silhouette 7y ago
We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure. There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected. There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well. But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely. To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them. You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.
asdff 7y ago
Cost aside, it just complicates your workplace and makes your success dependent on the continued performance of other companies. What if slack pushes an update that everyone in your office hates, or shuts down as a company one day? In the words of Bane, it would be extremely painful, for you. However, if you were old school and used IRC, you would have 40 years of documentation to help you solve any issues, and you probably won't have very much issues to begin with since people have been publicly using the protocol for 40 years and improving the experience. Plus it would be free and you wouldn't be dependent on anyone but yourselves staying in business.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation. Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?

fizixer 7y ago

Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile. You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".

CalChris 7y ago
My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.

Silhouette 7y ago

We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure. There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected. There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well. But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely. To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them. You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.

asdff 7y ago

Cost aside, it just complicates your workplace and makes your success dependent on the continued performance of other companies. What if slack pushes an update that everyone in your office hates, or shuts down as a company one day? In the words of Bane, it would be extremely painful, for you. However, if you were old school and used IRC, you would have 40 years of documentation to help you solve any issues, and you probably won't have very much issues to begin with since people have been publicly using the protocol for 40 years and improving the experience. Plus it would be free and you wouldn't be dependent on anyone but yourselves staying in business.