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I read about your business proposal on the tech co founder sites. Please don't take this personally but you come across as naive and amateurish. Hosting is a v

I read about your business proposal on the tech co founder sites. Please don't take this personally but you come across as naive and amateurish. Hosting is a very easy business to get into, unfortunately it's a very difficult business to make money out of. Why will your business compete effectively with something like AWS - which has such enormous scale and brand recognition? You mention that you've done some work for some famous people. Have you done any of that recently? If you have some rich contacts and you are good at sales then that could be your ticket. If so, you wouldn't need marketing - just get a basic brand site built in wordpress using a contractor on elance - and your requirement for a co founder goes away! From your business proposal: "I had a 6 figure inheritance which I blew". Why even say that? You just sound like a failire. And "I've got somewhere between 4 and 5 k to invest in this new enterprise". Somewhere between 4 and 5 k? That makes me think that you think 1k is a lot of money. That's a problem for someone who should be a company founder. Your business model is weak. You don't have much money to invest. Unless I'm missing something, you should save your money and try to do something that is in some way innovative so that you can compete.

cdvonstinkpot 13y ago
Maybe I _am_ naive, I'm not educated by any business school, and am just an ambitious guy with a few thousand dollars and a desire to ship. As for my experience with the previous high-end experience, it's unfortunate that I ended my term with 1 of the companies on not-so-great terms, and I wouldn't feel comfortable contacting them for help with anything, and they wouldn't be able to help anyway except with maybe a part-time day job, which I couldn't get to without relocating anyway, so they're help is a no-go. The other guys would talk to me but they could only do so much- across the country, neither could really help with this venture. And I don't have a problem mentioning my last venture although it failed because it wasn't any of my doing that caused it to fail- I ended up in the hospital and unable to attend to the startup for a period of time, where it became necessary to sell its assets to cover hospital expenses & rent instead of continuing it to completion. I'm still proud of how far I got with it, I was a year away of being able to support myself with it. And I would have if I hadn't gotten sick. I kindof do think a grand is alot of money, but I know base don my last startup that it only goes so far in a startup. I do tend to think its possible to get a foot in the door with 5k though. Which is my goal with this project. Right now I only aim to make enough to be able to slowly grow the company, so making enough to save half & reinvest it will make me happy even if its $250/month. I mean, it's only a $4k investment.
- jabbernotty 13y ago
  Considering that you fell ill, it doesn't seem right to say that you blew it.
- melbourne_mat 13y ago
  There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming at. I would describe 'Big data' to mean the size at which traditional database technology stops being useful in your project. It's usually when the volume of the data is large. I recently worked on a low end big data project. They had 4 very large, traditional database servers and the workload wasn't suited to that kind of server. They rearchitected, spent a bunch of money and moved to a 20 node hadoop cluster (each node was small - perhaps a few $k each). Because the workload suited hadoop they are now able to scale up easily and to great advantage. Note that I describe that project as low end. 20 nodes is small in the big data world. So when you say "I think it's possible to get a foot in the door with 5k", I think that perhaps you don't know enough about your market to make that statement. Don't do anything further on this project until you've fully validated your business plan. There are some good ideas on how to do that in the other comments here.
  - cdvonstinkpot 13y ago
    So I ought not mention 'big data' until I can be running the ScaleMP phase. In the meantime I'm just a run-of-the-mill dedicated server vendor.

cdvonstinkpot 13y ago

Maybe I _am_ naive, I'm not educated by any business school, and am just an ambitious guy with a few thousand dollars and a desire to ship. As for my experience with the previous high-end experience, it's unfortunate that I ended my term with 1 of the companies on not-so-great terms, and I wouldn't feel comfortable contacting them for help with anything, and they wouldn't be able to help anyway except with maybe a part-time day job, which I couldn't get to without relocating anyway, so they're help is a no-go. The other guys would talk to me but they could only do so much- across the country, neither could really help with this venture. And I don't have a problem mentioning my last venture although it failed because it wasn't any of my doing that caused it to fail- I ended up in the hospital and unable to attend to the startup for a period of time, where it became necessary to sell its assets to cover hospital expenses & rent instead of continuing it to completion. I'm still proud of how far I got with it, I was a year away of being able to support myself with it. And I would have if I hadn't gotten sick. I kindof do think a grand is alot of money, but I know base don my last startup that it only goes so far in a startup. I do tend to think its possible to get a foot in the door with 5k though. Which is my goal with this project. Right now I only aim to make enough to be able to slowly grow the company, so making enough to save half & reinvest it will make me happy even if its $250/month. I mean, it's only a $4k investment.

jabbernotty 13y ago
Considering that you fell ill, it doesn't seem right to say that you blew it.
melbourne_mat 13y ago
There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming at. I would describe 'Big data' to mean the size at which traditional database technology stops being useful in your project. It's usually when the volume of the data is large. I recently worked on a low end big data project. They had 4 very large, traditional database servers and the workload wasn't suited to that kind of server. They rearchitected, spent a bunch of money and moved to a 20 node hadoop cluster (each node was small - perhaps a few $k each). Because the workload suited hadoop they are now able to scale up easily and to great advantage. Note that I describe that project as low end. 20 nodes is small in the big data world. So when you say "I think it's possible to get a foot in the door with 5k", I think that perhaps you don't know enough about your market to make that statement. Don't do anything further on this project until you've fully validated your business plan. There are some good ideas on how to do that in the other comments here.
- cdvonstinkpot 13y ago
  So I ought not mention 'big data' until I can be running the ScaleMP phase. In the meantime I'm just a run-of-the-mill dedicated server vendor.