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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#101

Post by renewiltord »

sneak wrote: post #17
geraldwhen wrote: post #2

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.

Hard to say but good devrel drives grassroots adoption. Ultimately, though, VCs no longer will fund without revenue growth in addition to user growth.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#102

Post by mrkurt »

styren wrote: post #83

I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 pe…

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow.

We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware.

For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers build better stuff over a long period of time. This takes _forever_ because companies-with-procurement-processes are designed to not buy critical infrastructure from startups.

It's working for us so far, even if it's not for you yet.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#103

Post by esteth »

Solvency wrote: post #92
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simpl…

Sometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you want to do.

If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#104

Post by danpalmer »

h_mirin wrote: post #18

I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku. I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.

This is the biggest draw for me. I don't have a need for Fly at the moment, like I have not needed Heroku most of the time, but its got strong mindshare for me. Heroku was basically great, and apart from not quite keeping up with modern practices and having recent outages, it's still otherwise a great UX. Fly feels like that but updated for the modern age.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#105

Post by ren_engineer »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

>My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding

you're basically going to be prevented from using anything that isn't an established enterprise(which are also beholden to shareholders) or consumer apps. You can't bootstrap anything that requires significant R&D or infrastructure unless the founder is already rich

This post seems to be referencing the Reddit API situation. The solution is to not make your company reliant on a single API , pretty sure with Fly you can deploy Docker containers so you could always switch easily if they tried to price gouge. If something is a critical component of your business you should always plan to be able to switch providers in a hurry for any number of reasons

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#106

Post by berkle4455 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

I don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8 vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the same.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#107

Post by xNeil »

bearjaws wrote: post #51
eduction wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it's "for press" just kicks the can down the road, raising the question "why do startups want press on announcements like these?" They do it to get out a certain message and leave a certain impression, usually of the mercenary sort the post outlines. Although I see your point about it just being to get the name of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary motivation that the post maybe did not men…

The math is pretty straight forward. Cost to make article = $2000 Article gets 100,000 views Fly.io converts 1% of views to paying customers 1,000 new customers. Revenue per customer = $10 monthly MRR goes up by $10,000 Obviously I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, but there a pretty direct path to value. This is way more efficient than Google ads in a competitive space, I can only imagine hosting related ads a…

You're right - I also think (personal opinion) the trust gained in a company by reading their blog post is greater than the trust gained by seeing an ad. Because I saw this blogpost, I trust fly.io more than I would have had I seen a YouTube ad of them or something of the sorts.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#109

Post by tylergetsay »

tptacek wrote: post #25
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "raised money" post. So presumably they raised money so they can have a database answer in the future.

We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people, and the platform strategy is to build durable storage primitives that work for as many different databases as possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.

Do you have any info about how edge deployments + sqlite work and what kind of applications they are limited to?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#110

Post by toomuchtodo »

Zetice wrote: post #99
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

Honest question: why are you on a site whose community is literally created and run by a startup accelerator? It's a given you realize how antagonistic you're being here, so I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?

Curious people are allowed some latitude when historical performance predicts future outcomes [1]. This is "not the first rodeo" as it were. Agree being antagonistic is not welcome, but it should not be unwelcome to ask hard questions about how something won't end up the same.

I like the Fly.io folks! But asking questions should never be off the table; how else would you be curious?

[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

(it is unfortunate that something with so much value and enjoyment like HN is a product of an investment firm, but a component of life is compromise; enjoy it like you would a public good while it lasts)

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