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If you are not willing to risk 70$ per month you are in the wrong business my friend, or you are woefully too cash-strapped even the smallest bootstrap should b

by marcus 19y ago

If you are not willing to risk 70$ per month you are in the wrong business my friend, or you are woefully too cash-strapped even the smallest bootstrap should be able to afford that. And what's the alternative going down the Twitter road? I think not... Always have a reasonable scalability plan preplanned, it doesn't have to be fully implemented but you should devote some thought cycles to the problem and have a road map for scaling.

pius 19y ago
Um, who are you to discourage this person because he doesn't want to blow $70 a month needlessly rather than spend $20 on a decent server slice? Not trying to troll here, but this comment makes you sound like a pompous ass who's never bootstrapped a company. Sure, it's important to have a scalability strategy planned, but that's nowhere near the same thing as wasting money on excess capacity before you need it. I suppose a few years ago you would have advised the HotOrNot guys that if they couldn't afford to maintain a standing account with Akamai before launching, they were in the wrong business too.
- marcus 19y ago
  I wasn't trying to be condescending and I apologize if I hurt any one. I have actually bootstrapped quite a few startups (crashed and burned horribly on the first 3, only the 4th one actually made me a bit of money). And when I thought I didn't have enough money saved for what I thought I needed as bare minimum I suffered through another couple of months in my day job before taking the plunge. The entire advantage of Amazons services is that you don't need to pre-purchase too much capacity and you can scale relatively painlessly so long as you designed your server architecture for it. I admire the HotOrNot guys for their "beg, burrow, steal" approach, I wish I had even a fraction of it. And that was exactly the right thing to do back then. But now the infrastructure has improved so much that you don't need to do it for servers. Keep your energies for the other hundreds of battles you'll need to fight on your way & good luck
  - imsteve 19y ago
    Not everyone has a stable day job before they get into a startup. It's not in everyone's best interest to suffer through one for a few years first either.

by marcus 19y ago

pius 19y ago

Um, who are you to discourage this person because he doesn't want to blow $70 a month needlessly rather than spend $20 on a decent server slice? Not trying to troll here, but this comment makes you sound like a pompous ass who's never bootstrapped a company. Sure, it's important to have a scalability strategy planned, but that's nowhere near the same thing as wasting money on excess capacity before you need it. I suppose a few years ago you would have advised the HotOrNot guys that if they couldn't afford to maintain a standing account with Akamai before launching, they were in the wrong business too.

marcus 19y ago
I wasn't trying to be condescending and I apologize if I hurt any one. I have actually bootstrapped quite a few startups (crashed and burned horribly on the first 3, only the 4th one actually made me a bit of money). And when I thought I didn't have enough money saved for what I thought I needed as bare minimum I suffered through another couple of months in my day job before taking the plunge. The entire advantage of Amazons services is that you don't need to pre-purchase too much capacity and you can scale relatively painlessly so long as you designed your server architecture for it. I admire the HotOrNot guys for their "beg, burrow, steal" approach, I wish I had even a fraction of it. And that was exactly the right thing to do back then. But now the infrastructure has improved so much that you don't need to do it for servers. Keep your energies for the other hundreds of battles you'll need to fight on your way & good luck
- imsteve 19y ago
  Not everyone has a stable day job before they get into a startup. It's not in everyone's best interest to suffer through one for a few years first either.