I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling ( sure, ruby is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold and have bajillions to spend ), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups using dynamic languages. I've played a…
Yeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers, and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems administrators who are often more expensive than programmers.
I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.