MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch • Hacker News Board

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#21

Post by jcadam » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

teddyuk wrote: post #11

swiley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you bother with a relational database at that point? That sounds like it’s not normalized. I haven’t read the post... maybe I’m missing something.

because they didn't know what they were doing - I can say this as this is what the blog shows, they don't understand databases and customers (including me) have suffered this

I've learned much too late in my career that competent software engineering is completely orthogonal to creating a successful(from a market perspective) software product.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#22

Post by notyourday » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

You need plumbing, not a pile of clever rust code.

TL;DR Pay someone who knows how to work with baremetal servers, convert your $100k/mo AWS bill to $20k/mo infrastructure geek bill + It will give you a longer runway.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#23

Post by echelon » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

teddyuk wrote: post #16

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

onboard customers slowly and charge them - as you scale, make sure your charging as well and get paid. you don't need to go from 0 - 100k a month in a single month, octopus could because they have backing.

This is a social media app, so I can't charge money for it. My hope would be for funding or a buyout. Otherwise it will be shut down.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#24

Post by phamilton » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

teddyuk wrote: post #3

teddyuk wrote: post #2

"To bring Octopus Cloud to market quickly, we did the simplest thing possible; we took our self-hosted Octopus Server product and bundled it into an EC2 instance for each customer that signed up. We had to make changes to the product, but mostly around permissions." I have used octopus and I could have told them that they can't lift-and-shift. The amount of requests the app makes is ridiculous, the way they wrote the…

From the "sql-as-document-store" post, I re-read it every now and then to realise how actually terrible it is: "For a many-to-many, we do something a bit naughty: we store the values with | characters between each value:" Not naughty, stupid.

The approach seemed reasonable enough until I hit that point.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#25

Post by jcadam » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

> Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work?

Nobody is going to give a line of credit to a brand new company (LLC or not) without a personal guarantee from the owner.

> All that said, I'm almost certain that a successful demo at scale with the Internet thrown at it will get me money.

I would not rack up $100k of personal debt to get to a demo.

But maybe don't listen to me, I'm a 40 year old programmer with a few failed attempts at bootstrapping behind me. Quite possibly at least one of those died due to being capital starved :)

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#26

Post by eightysixfour » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

teddyuk wrote: post #2

"To bring Octopus Cloud to market quickly, we did the simplest thing possible; we took our self-hosted Octopus Server product and bundled it into an EC2 instance for each customer that signed up. We had to make changes to the product, but mostly around permissions." I have used octopus and I could have told them that they can't lift-and-shift. The amount of requests the app makes is ridiculous, the way they wrote the…

While I agree with you that it seems like they make some serious engineering mistakes, it was a successful MVP in that it told there there was sufficient demand to justify a rewrite for the cloud.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#27

Post by navigatesol » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

I don't think your problem is unique. I have a few ideas that if I could only get substantial funding for just might work. That said:

>Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work? Then fold without harm or fowl if it doesn't? Is that unethical?

Any bank worth their salt won't simply hand over a huge line of credit for an idea. Banks are risk averse, that's why VC exists. But hey, if you are honest with your plan and they give you money, this is the route.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#28

Post by LeonM » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #19

> Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up. > We also didn’t have our pricing quite right. We initially launched Octopus Cloud at $10/month, with a different pricing model from the one we currently use. Unfortunately, this was one of the most painful lessons we learned because the deficit b…

Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#29

Post by 101008 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

I think you are over confident on the "public face" of your app, and not the "private side" of it. You are saying it would be great and people would talk about it because it is really cool.

I am not saying that's not true - but that isn't enough to make it a product (or being bought out). Some of the most popular products out there aren't hard to do. The complicated part is how to scale them to be as fast with that many users and don't lose money. Twitter? It could be done in a few months (I am not saying it is a weekend project), but that doesn't mean you have Twitter. The hard part of Twitter is not tweet, publish, have followers, is doing in almost realm time with that amount of data. You could say almost the same for YouTube (Upload and play video? Easy. Do it for millions of video at the same time... oops!).

Try to optimize your backend, so it doesn't cost much money. If not, you have just something that does something nice but it doens't do it well. Many people can do that. The secret of success is doing great things without consume many resources.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#30

Post by navigatesol » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #23

teddyuk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

onboard customers slowly and charge them - as you scale, make sure your charging as well and get paid. you don't need to go from 0 - 100k a month in a single month, octopus could because they have backing.

This is a social media app, so I can't charge money for it. My hope would be for funding or a buyout. Otherwise it will be shut down.

Trying to wrap my head around this: someone needs to make money from it, or what would they be buying out? So why not you?

If you need funding, then you have to build a compelling case sans demo. It's not unheard of.