How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud

After reading the blog post, I decided to hook up my little web app that I have been working on to use SendGrid. Although I had some trouble configuring it to work with Godaddy's Shared Hosting, I quickly took advantage of their email api. This is a pretty neat service and having 200 emails/day for me to use is great for testing.

Thanks for the insights and highlighting this service :)

Eric Ries calls it Technical Debt

A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and Rails, and it's amazing to see what they can do. Yes, prices go up when you need to scale out, but getting an idea out in front of people and seeing if people will use the product is so important. Spending weeks implementing a difficult payment gateway and setting up a scalable infrustructure only to find out that nobody cares about what you built is so costly compared to banging something out in a weekend.

In 3 days you can prove it. I built http://rendera.heroku.com in 1 day and launched it. People liked it enough to convince me to add all sorts of fun things to it. It still runs on the free plan, but if nobody liked it, I could have found that out and moved on to something else.

To the OP, nice job!

Here's an example for you:

I use Slicehost, which is rather more costly than similar VPS options such as Linode. This costs me something on the order of $2,000 a year -- but it works, almost flawlessly. With sufficient time available, I could theoretically migrate to Linode (or EC2 or wherever) and shave off ~40% of that bill, but I don't have to. There will never be a day where I say "Aww effity I wanted to develop features or do marketing today but I can't because if I don't get off Slicehost right the heck now I will suffer angst-inducing downtime."

Technical debt, on the other hand, looks something like this: the printing code in the Java version of my software is an offense against God, and I cannot incorporate new features into it without a complete rewrite. No kidding -- I want to be able to put a title on those bingo cards, but it architecturally just will not support that. It is a mess of kludges and a class hierarchy descending from FailFactoryServiceLocator, held together by duct tape and prayers. The fact that it functions at all is a miracle.

That is technical debt: I would like to incorporate new features my customers want into that version of the program, but I just can't until I rip its rotten heart out and start over. That is, in fact, so much technical debt that I'm probably just going to End Of Life the sucker and concentrate on the web version and my new projects rather than deal with it.

He's talking about the BrainTrust.io logo in the sidebar. They do look quite similar, though it's not relevant to this thread at all.