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

octopus.com

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

#31

Post by pjc50 »

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'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale.

Do some maths.

Get one (1) small EC2 instance on the free tier. Deploy the test version there. Keep adding test clients until the thing is maxed out (presumably on CPU for your application?). That gives you a ceiling for "peak usage". You may find this is surprisingly high.

Come up with a ballpark figure for how many client requests a normal user will make in a day.

You can now start producing cost numbers for using various solutions, from AWS to dedicated hosting. If you don't have deep pockets, do not choose an option which can incur unlimited bills.

Before you can even think of selling it to someone, you need to have a compelling revenue story. Not actual revenue, but a convincing path to revenue. These days that's usually advertising. Can you bung some ads in there from Google to cover startup costs?

Which would you rather have, the system page you in the middle of the night to add more instances manually, or the system do it on your behalf without regard to cost?

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

#32

Post by echelon »

navigatesol wrote: post #27
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…

Approaching VC with a small scale demo is a fantastic idea!

I'm hoping for a quick viral demo, press coverage, and then either more funding or a quick exit. Enough funding to handle the intital traffic will absolutely accomplish what I want.

I've already written the app, so I can show it off.

This is a great idea! Thanks so much! :)

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

#34

Post by dominotw »

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…

> the irony of a company whose product appears to be about cloud deployment having a disaster by deploying to the cloud should not be lost on us

Is that really irony though?

I would think irony here would be them writing a blogpost about their troubles with their cloud deployments.

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

#35

Post by bananocurrency »

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.

>My hope would be for funding or a buyout

...you're going to get bought by a company that knows it can't make money from it?

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

#36

Post by teddyuk »

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.

Just stop what you are doing, you need to have a way to generate revenue if you want to sell it.

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

#37

Post by blantonl »

The architectural decision to deploy each customer on their own segmented components to make sure that "no one user’s data to mingle with another" seems to me like a solution in search of a problem.

First, the deployment was on AWS (EC2 and RDS among other services) which was probably already co-mingled with other AWS customers.

Second, when you are selling a SAAS offering, the assumption is already there that you'll build security and multi-tenancy into the app and the underlying infrastructure shouldn't matter.

And 100K/month for a MVP SAAS offering. I'm speechless. I just, I can't even understand how this burn rate passed muster with the leadership.

But Kudos to the team for owning up to it and sharing. Lots of lessons learned here.

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

#39

Post by LeonM »

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.

> Not naughty, stupid.

Why didn't they just make 1 table with 1 column and put a JSON object in it with all customer data? This would fit their design objective "Avoid the need for joins as much as possible"! It's brilliant! We'll call it: noSQL, because we don't even have to write that pesky SQL!

Can't wait for the next blog post where they discover another naughty trick called primary keys to increase their NoSQL performance even more!

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

#40

Post by bronco21016 »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #33

Can't wait for this Cloud meme to die out and we can go back to On Prem but instead of VMs managed by VMWare, Cloudstack, Vagrant, LXC etc, we will have nodes managed by Kubernetes.

Why would cloud go away? If you’re a team of 3-4 people and have a startup idea what’s easier? Create an AWS account and smartly spin up required servers?

Or find a location (rent$), get fiber($$) to that location($$), find hardware($$), install said hardware. Now you’re back to where you were with AWS.

For larger already established businesses on prem is probably a setup you should explore but on day 0 of a new business, cloud will probably have a large cost and flexibility advantage as long as you smartly set it up.

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