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I'm that guy whom the post is talking about. I decided against weighing in on the original thread on HN because I was still dealing with the downfall. A couple

I'm that guy whom the post is talking about. I decided against weighing in on the original thread on HN because I was still dealing with the downfall. A couple of things that I noticed: * Our users were very understanding of what happened. We have received nothing but encouragement to keep on working. * Some comments on HN were nasty. I'm glad to be 33 and not 23. Otherwise, I could have been driven away from building my product because of my own incompetence. * Many commented on devs vs ops. The way I see it, I can ask a dev to supervise the work of an ops contractor. I can't hire ops + dev at this stage. Any start-up has three main constraints: time, money and talent. These are not set in stone, you can use time to produce money (consulting), you can use money to buy talent (hiring), and you can even convert time in talent (training). So, when people say "let professionals handle it". Well, no, my particular set of constraints won't allow me to do this. My budget for this is around $100/mo. In an event where I completely run out of money I'd have to take down the site indefinitely, which causes the same effect as an HD loss. It is clear now that I lack enough resources to run a complex app reliably. My focus in the next months is procuring those resources (money) so I can put it back into the product (ops and devs).

lovskogen 13y ago
You could team up with a technical person, though!
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Might be the difference between startup and company. So while you're proving out your idea you probably don't need a whole lot of ops (but doing backups and source code control is just good development practice) As a company you need 5 things; 1) Design talent - presenting the coolness in a way that others can understand 2) Technical talent - taking great ideas and composing systems to make them real. 3) Legal talent - to keep you covered from the folks who would want to kill you when you are successful. 4) Operations talent - making sure that you can keep doing what your doing over time 5) Sales talent - communicating what you are doing in a way that the picture appears in someone else's head, and the value is clear. You need coverage on all 5 of those skill sets, you might find someone who can cover two or three (they will be in high demand) or you may need to recruit to fill them, but unless you have them all you're highest risk of failure will be that undefended flank.
- duopixel 13y ago
  Yes, but each of these come at the proper moment. The iTunes Store covers most of 3, 4 and 5 as an indie dev and then, if you feel comfortable, scale up to be a "company".
lsc 13y ago
>So, when people say "let professionals handle it". Well, no, my particular set of constraints won't allow me to do this. My budget for this is around $100/mo. In an event where I completely run out of money I'd have to take down the site indefinitely, which causes the same effect as an HD loss. well, drat. I was talking about launching a "tested backups" service, but it's just not really worth my time until you get to the $500/month level or so, and I'd probably want a setup fee on top of that. (For that, I'd give you a full working replication of your production site, hosted on my stuff- something that, in case of emergency, you could cut over your dns and just run with. Something that you could go to at any time and check on by going to yourdomain.backups.prgmr.com or something. Obviously, this would take me setting up some sort of replication of your database. Obviously, this also means that I'd need to know your application well enough to figure out how to make the running backup not conflict with the primary, and how to cut over to the backup /as/ a primary and how to cut back.) I mean, I can do basic backups really cheaply, but testing them? that... that takes effort. Effort and understanding the application. And untested backups, meh, there's no reason for you to pay me to do it (maybe you pay me for space, but that's the cheap part.) there are thousands of services that will cheaply give you a place to hold files. Huh. Most of the work, on my end, would be up front. What if I charged you $100/month, but made you pre-pay a year in advance or something? that might be worth it for me. (assuming I had the option to back out and refund your money within the first X days should your application prove to be too difficult to replicate.)
- duopixel 13y ago
  I think $100/mo is a good price for tested backups. But it's only in hindsight that I can see this is a good deal. To the average person, backing up means connecting an external HD and let Time Machine/whatever take it from there.
- jnw2 13y ago
  If the production server is running as a VM to begin with, how hard is it to take a snapshot of the whole VM and replicate that? (It does sort of break down if you have a database that's continuously updated and you want to try to have a continuously updated copy of the database, though.)

lovskogen 13y ago

You could team up with a technical person, though!

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Might be the difference between startup and company. So while you're proving out your idea you probably don't need a whole lot of ops (but doing backups and source code control is just good development practice) As a company you need 5 things; 1) Design talent - presenting the coolness in a way that others can understand 2) Technical talent - taking great ideas and composing systems to make them real. 3) Legal talent - to keep you covered from the folks who would want to kill you when you are successful. 4) Operations talent - making sure that you can keep doing what your doing over time 5) Sales talent - communicating what you are doing in a way that the picture appears in someone else's head, and the value is clear. You need coverage on all 5 of those skill sets, you might find someone who can cover two or three (they will be in high demand) or you may need to recruit to fill them, but unless you have them all you're highest risk of failure will be that undefended flank.

duopixel 13y ago
Yes, but each of these come at the proper moment. The iTunes Store covers most of 3, 4 and 5 as an indie dev and then, if you feel comfortable, scale up to be a "company".

lsc 13y ago

>So, when people say "let professionals handle it". Well, no, my particular set of constraints won't allow me to do this. My budget for this is around $100/mo. In an event where I completely run out of money I'd have to take down the site indefinitely, which causes the same effect as an HD loss. well, drat. I was talking about launching a "tested backups" service, but it's just not really worth my time until you get to the $500/month level or so, and I'd probably want a setup fee on top of that. (For that, I'd give you a full working replication of your production site, hosted on my stuff- something that, in case of emergency, you could cut over your dns and just run with. Something that you could go to at any time and check on by going to yourdomain.backups.prgmr.com or something. Obviously, this would take me setting up some sort of replication of your database. Obviously, this also means that I'd need to know your application well enough to figure out how to make the running backup not conflict with the primary, and how to cut over to the backup /as/ a primary and how to cut back.) I mean, I can do basic backups really cheaply, but testing them? that... that takes effort. Effort and understanding the application. And untested backups, meh, there's no reason for you to pay me to do it (maybe you pay me for space, but that's the cheap part.) there are thousands of services that will cheaply give you a place to hold files. Huh. Most of the work, on my end, would be up front. What if I charged you $100/month, but made you pre-pay a year in advance or something? that might be worth it for me. (assuming I had the option to back out and refund your money within the first X days should your application prove to be too difficult to replicate.)

duopixel 13y ago
I think $100/mo is a good price for tested backups. But it's only in hindsight that I can see this is a good deal. To the average person, backing up means connecting an external HD and let Time Machine/whatever take it from there.
jnw2 13y ago
If the production server is running as a VM to begin with, how hard is it to take a snapshot of the whole VM and replicate that? (It does sort of break down if you have a database that's continuously updated and you want to try to have a continuously updated copy of the database, though.)