Ask HN: What would you do with $20000 USD for your startup?

I'm in the position of using a $20 000 USD budget (seed funding) to grow one of my main side projects, what would you do with the money if you were in my position, how would you proceed ?

So far: Purchased a MBP for iphone dev. (I needed a new computer), hired a virtual assistent to help me on a couple of administrative tasks for a couple of hours a week, purchased a better VPS hosting plan. I'm planing to allocate a small budget to Google Adwords and maybe Facebook Ads. I understand the only thing I shall really focus on now is growth (not just in number of users but also revenues/profit)

What should come next or better, wow would you use the money for your own project? What would your plan be?

Really depends on what kind of product I would have at which state and what I need to do next.

If I were at your position and the product is actually ready already I would spend all of that cash on advertising after I would make sure that my current server infrastructure can handle the possible growth.

Though first I would calculate how many new visitors I possibly could get from adwords with the cash. Once the calculation is done I need to test if the possible growth can be handled. If I can not handle the growth I would check how much new hardware I would need and buy and install those. The rest of the money would be used in adwords for new possible clients to create more revenue.

I would not have used the money to get new computer or hired virtual assistent, because I see that as a waste of money. Then again I would not even bought that VPS as I would have one or two dedicated servers anyway.

Definitely search advertising like AdWords + Yahoo + Bing. Capture the people looking what you are offering. Therefore, they will probably search and be willing to pay. Think about search terms. Worth every cent if done right! And don't believe the "automated" bid stuff in AdWords. Fine tune your own bids and review regularly. Squeeze as much as you can out of your spend and understand your market. Use LOTS of different messages to experiment.

FB is nothing more than broadcast advertising, like TV. Too unreliable and not worth the money. I'm still dubious about click fraud on FB.

Consider your VPS environment and make sure it's redundant (ideally multi-location). Depending on your project, nothing worse than disappointing your paying customers, so best to get the production environment right.

Hold on to as much CASH as you can so that you can react to opportunities as they arise. Depending on your product, some other careful marketing could really pay off - like booths at appropriate conferences.

Make sure you build up lists of interest (email & sms) so you can repeat market later at much lower cost. Conversion isn't just about immediate sales; sometimes it's acquiring targets to sell to later. Depends on the sales cycle and decision process of your offering.

Hope it helps!

This Sir, is Gold! It gets me on the right mindset, Thank you.

As for the VPS environment, I'm giving Hetzner a shot, my front-end is very light so, it should be even faster faster soon, almost all my static assets are hosted on Google cloud storage and I'll probably being moving them to amazon as well, once I merge CSS files as well as JS files into single CSS & JS files. I'm also thinking of deploying a caching server (Varnish) in front of the site, but not yet sure if it'll really make sense or is just over-engineering.

As for the lists, that's what the virtual assistent is doing so far and I'm happy with what I see. Yes, it helps a lot. Thank you.

What kind of of CTR were you getting?