Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

Post by dotcoma » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 8:07 PM UTC

getsat wrote: post #163

dotcoma wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, "profitable". Let's say at break even. And yet somehow they needed 200 more million, for a total of 360 million sunk into that ship. Do you have a clue of how profitable a company in which 360 million dollars were invested needs to be? Do you really see them ever getting even close to being that profitable? How?

Having worked from Twitter's office in late 2009, I'm privy to a bit of their financials from that time and onward. They're definitely profitable since then. Profitable companies often raise money... I don't see why this is out of the ordinary. It lets you scale and make more money more quickly. Another startup I worked for did the exact same thing as soon as they became profitable.

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 8:37 PM UTC

AlexC04 wrote: post #119

gsteph22 wrote: post #30

FYI: Heroku is fantastic for scaling apps. But if it's your database that's the bottleneck...you've got problems. Because your options with SQL are scaling up or sharding, each quite painful. If you want any advice, ping me.

Perhaps rewriting the database to use MongoDB? Their http://www.mongodb.org/ tutorial took about 10 minutes and is really easy to get to know. As a DB they say it's designed for SPEED and SCALE. It might be worth looking at. (who's got the time right?) :)

Post by dotcoma » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 8:58 PM UTC

dotcoma wrote: post #171

getsat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked from Twitter's office in late 2009, I'm privy to a bit of their financials from that time and onward. They're definitely profitable since then. Profitable companies often raise money... I don't see why this is out of the ordinary. It lets you scale and make more money more quickly. Another startup I worked for did the exact same thing as soon as they became profitable.

yeah, sure, for example, they could sell data about their tweets to search engines other than Google and Bing. Oh, wait, too bad there are none - or not in the parts of the world where people use Twitter, anyway. so, yes, 200 million on top of 160 million already invested for a company that is making 10 or 20 million at most and that has no other way of making money in sight is, well, yes, I would dare say quite out…

Post by jarin » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 10:08 PM UTC

jarin wrote: post #174

Oooh, hey this is bad. If you go to http://threewords.me/username.xml you can see the user's Facebook access token, secret, session key, and hashed password. You should probably remove that view or modify the to_xml in the user model.

Post by getsat » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 10:10 PM UTC

dotcoma wrote: post #171

getsat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked from Twitter's office in late 2009, I'm privy to a bit of their financials from that time and onward. They're definitely profitable since then. Profitable companies often raise money... I don't see why this is out of the ordinary. It lets you scale and make more money more quickly. Another startup I worked for did the exact same thing as soon as they became profitable.

yeah, sure, for example, they could sell data about their tweets to search engines other than Google and Bing. Oh, wait, too bad there are none - or not in the parts of the world where people use Twitter, anyway. so, yes, 200 million on top of 160 million already invested for a company that is making 10 or 20 million at most and that has no other way of making money in sight is, well, yes, I would dare say quite out…