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There's a noteworthy pattern I've observed over the last 24 months. I founded a design subscription service for startups [1]. Many founders are increasingly ta

by krm01 3y ago

There's a noteworthy pattern I've observed over the last 24 months. I founded a design subscription service for startups [1]. Many founders are increasingly tapping into subscription based services, whether that’s for design, development, sales etc. to help them reach a certain level of scalability. Historically we’d have a harder time getting clients, but for many startups having these plug & play teams makes the startup much more lean. You don’t have to provide a gazillion employee benefits or other cash draining things. its nuts how so many startups just burn through their VC money buying things that do not directly impact their product and business. A startup should do nothing except build something people love. To do so find more economic and effecient ways to get to product market fit asap. You can do all of the fun stuff later. [1] http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro

encodedrose 3y ago
Similar story for cloud services, we've seen startups burn through 100K in AWS credits before they even launch a product.
- Dudester230602 3y ago
  The "Kubernetes is actually not overcomplicated" crowd, I presume?
  - avbanks 3y ago
    I hate to say it but it isn't though. In 2023 you'll probably want Automated rollouts and rollbacks, Storage orchestration, Secret and configuration management, Service discovery and load balancing, Self-healing, Horizontal scaling, Automatic bin packing (on vms) k8's gives you this if you want BUT you don't even have to use those things.
- sitkack 3y ago
  It is fine to use the cloud for your initial landing zone project. But once you are n-weeks in, you really should have 1/2 or full rack at a colo with enough bandwidth and storage to backup your on two servers. I'd start with DO or Hetzner, https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud And then move to own hardware in a colo. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus At the same time, I'd probably keep each project as I went. From day-0 you should have some form of cloud presence in all the providers, at least a root of trust landing zone you can work from to build out infra should you need to.
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    Frankly a many companies wouldn't need something like that for a while, if ever. If you're really doing compute intensive stuff sure, otherwise for your average webapp what would be the advantage of rolling your own infra?
    - sitkack 3y ago
      A webapp isn't a company. If you have a company, you should have at least half a rack of hardware in a colo. Being 100% on the cloud is a grave mistake.
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        I guess Netflix isn't a company then, since they use AWS after all. You might think AWS isn't a good deal but it's hyperbolic to call companies that are on cloud services as not being real companies.
        azemetre 3y ago
        I don't think Netflix is a startup, could be wrong tho. I hear they want to start a streaming division and venture away from mailing DVDs.
        satvikpendem 3y ago
        > A webapp isn't a company. If you have a company, you should have at least half a rack of hardware in a colo. is the quote I was replying to. The parent doesn't mention startups, they say the word company so of course I'd have taken it as all companies as a whole. There is no hard and fast rule that every company must have "half a rack of hardware in a colo" or otherwise they're not a "real company." This is basically the No True Scotsman fallacy in action.
        vikramkr 3y ago
        I mean basically a company just has to make money, and today, dealing with a colo and all is probably just going to get in the way of that for the vast majority of companies in the early stages. Making the claim that relying on cloud is a big mistake is a pretty bold claim as well
- jjav 3y ago
  > Similar story for cloud services, we've seen startups burn through 100K in AWS credits before they even launch a product. I've seen and experienced this too many times already. And AWS knows how to play that game better than startups. By the time credits run out the startup is so locked in to AWS there is no way out and then the big invoices start coming in.
HWR_14 3y ago
> A startup should do nothing except build something people love. Even if you build something people love, that doesn't necessarily mean you can monetize it.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  No, but if you burn through cash on, say, Jira and a ton of plugins and a guy to admin it, developing your own UI toolkit, going full Web Scale DevOps Kubernetes madness from day one or building a designer microconcrete-with-gold-inlay ballpit-slash-lunch bar, you can monetise something and still run out of cash.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Oh, totally true. But its also possible to build a startup where you get customers contacting you that they love your product daily and its almost impossible to monetize.
JohnFen 3y ago
> its nuts how so many startups just burn through their VC money buying things that do not directly impact their product and business. An old mentor of mine taught me this, and my personal observations over the years have backed him up on it. Having too much money is a greater danger to your venture than having too little money. If you have too much, you're just going to spend it on things that not only don't matter, but are likely to incur greater costs down the road. I'm a believer that startups should be cash hungry (but not starved). It helps keep the focus.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  One of my coworker used to work in hydrocarbons exploration. He swears that they multiplied their finding rate by twenty after dividing their budget by ten. It seems what you say stays true at any size.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  > If you have too much, you're just going to spend it on things that not only don't matter Co-founder and I recently went through a round of VC interviews with at least 5-6 VCs. Question I posed to him is "If we got $2.5 million tomorrow, what would you do differently than what you're doing today?" My point to him is that there's really nothing that we could do with $2.5m that we couldn't do today at a smaller scale/longer timeline. It would be nice for other reasons like having a higher profile, accelerate some of our roadmap, etc. Both of us walked away from the experience a little jaded, TBH. He's close to a circle of folks in YC and was perplexed by some of the folks that made the last batch.
  - edanm 3y ago
    Wouldn't a good answer be "run more experiments in parallel to find product/market fit faster?" I'm not saying it's easy (or possible) in all cases, but an extra $2.5 million before you have product-market fit doesn't sound like something that is impossible to utilize in an effective manner.
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago

by krm01 3y ago

encodedrose 3y ago

Similar story for cloud services, we've seen startups burn through 100K in AWS credits before they even launch a product.

Dudester230602 3y ago
The "Kubernetes is actually not overcomplicated" crowd, I presume?
- avbanks 3y ago
  I hate to say it but it isn't though. In 2023 you'll probably want Automated rollouts and rollbacks, Storage orchestration, Secret and configuration management, Service discovery and load balancing, Self-healing, Horizontal scaling, Automatic bin packing (on vms) k8's gives you this if you want BUT you don't even have to use those things.
sitkack 3y ago
It is fine to use the cloud for your initial landing zone project. But once you are n-weeks in, you really should have 1/2 or full rack at a colo with enough bandwidth and storage to backup your on two servers. I'd start with DO or Hetzner, https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud And then move to own hardware in a colo. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/aplus At the same time, I'd probably keep each project as I went. From day-0 you should have some form of cloud presence in all the providers, at least a root of trust landing zone you can work from to build out infra should you need to.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  Frankly a many companies wouldn't need something like that for a while, if ever. If you're really doing compute intensive stuff sure, otherwise for your average webapp what would be the advantage of rolling your own infra?
  - sitkack 3y ago
    A webapp isn't a company. If you have a company, you should have at least half a rack of hardware in a colo. Being 100% on the cloud is a grave mistake.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      I guess Netflix isn't a company then, since they use AWS after all. You might think AWS isn't a good deal but it's hyperbolic to call companies that are on cloud services as not being real companies.
      - azemetre 3y ago
        I don't think Netflix is a startup, could be wrong tho. I hear they want to start a streaming division and venture away from mailing DVDs.
        satvikpendem 3y ago
        > A webapp isn't a company. If you have a company, you should have at least half a rack of hardware in a colo. is the quote I was replying to. The parent doesn't mention startups, they say the word company so of course I'd have taken it as all companies as a whole. There is no hard and fast rule that every company must have "half a rack of hardware in a colo" or otherwise they're not a "real company." This is basically the No True Scotsman fallacy in action.
        vikramkr 3y ago
        I mean basically a company just has to make money, and today, dealing with a colo and all is probably just going to get in the way of that for the vast majority of companies in the early stages. Making the claim that relying on cloud is a big mistake is a pretty bold claim as well
jjav 3y ago
> Similar story for cloud services, we've seen startups burn through 100K in AWS credits before they even launch a product. I've seen and experienced this too many times already. And AWS knows how to play that game better than startups. By the time credits run out the startup is so locked in to AWS there is no way out and then the big invoices start coming in.

HWR_14 3y ago

> A startup should do nothing except build something people love. Even if you build something people love, that doesn't necessarily mean you can monetize it.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
No, but if you burn through cash on, say, Jira and a ton of plugins and a guy to admin it, developing your own UI toolkit, going full Web Scale DevOps Kubernetes madness from day one or building a designer microconcrete-with-gold-inlay ballpit-slash-lunch bar, you can monetise something and still run out of cash.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Oh, totally true. But its also possible to build a startup where you get customers contacting you that they love your product daily and its almost impossible to monetize.

JohnFen 3y ago

> its nuts how so many startups just burn through their VC money buying things that do not directly impact their product and business. An old mentor of mine taught me this, and my personal observations over the years have backed him up on it. Having too much money is a greater danger to your venture than having too little money. If you have too much, you're just going to spend it on things that not only don't matter, but are likely to incur greater costs down the road. I'm a believer that startups should be cash hungry (but not starved). It helps keep the focus.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
One of my coworker used to work in hydrocarbons exploration. He swears that they multiplied their finding rate by twenty after dividing their budget by ten. It seems what you say stays true at any size.
CharlieDigital 3y ago
> If you have too much, you're just going to spend it on things that not only don't matter Co-founder and I recently went through a round of VC interviews with at least 5-6 VCs. Question I posed to him is "If we got $2.5 million tomorrow, what would you do differently than what you're doing today?" My point to him is that there's really nothing that we could do with $2.5m that we couldn't do today at a smaller scale/longer timeline. It would be nice for other reasons like having a higher profile, accelerate some of our roadmap, etc. Both of us walked away from the experience a little jaded, TBH. He's close to a circle of folks in YC and was perplexed by some of the folks that made the last batch.
- edanm 3y ago
  Wouldn't a good answer be "run more experiments in parallel to find product/market fit faster?" I'm not saying it's easy (or possible) in all cases, but an extra $2.5 million before you have product-market fit doesn't sound like something that is impossible to utilize in an effective manner.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago