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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#51

Post by bearjaws »

eduction wrote: post #44
fishtoaster wrote: post #31

"Why do startups write announcements like these?" I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read…

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 are $3-5 per click...

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#52

Post by mrkurt »

nickpeterson wrote: post #35
candiddevmike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

Well if you’re right maybe in a couple years we’ll see a ‘We razed a bunch of money’ post, seems on brand.

I was planning an "Our incredible journey" post, but "We razed a bunch of money" is much better.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#53

Post by tptacek »

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…

Wouldn't that be a really short and boring blog post?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#54

Post by davepeck »

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?)

Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#55

Post by mrkurt »

cvwright wrote: post #38

> There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the margins work. Amen to that. Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it. But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"

They should, probably. We have partner-like customers who are paying actual hardware costs and then a platform fee for us to manage it.

You can only build so many company margins on top of capital expenditures.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#56

Post by kkielhofner »

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

People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc.

I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends.

When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#57

Post by EGreg »

madeofpalk wrote: post #50
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…

Exactly what went through my head when reading > There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.

[flagged]

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#58

Post by smallerfish »

Congrats! Please focus on getting your documentation cleaned up, your cli consistent, and bugs excised. Your platform is good, and doesn't need too many additional features. Make it all cleaner, rinse and repeat.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#59

Post by gaffneyc »

I'm a pretty happy Fly.io customer and glad to see the direction things have been going overall. While it's great to see Fly is getting more resources to continue improving and building the business I worry about the inevitable VC Countdown Clock to Exit.

What does this new round mean for Fly's long term independence?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#60

Post by tptacek »

davepeck wrote: post #54

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?) Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?

I'd never used it before I joined Fly.io, but everybody else in this company absolutely adored it; they're like the Rolling Stones to our Black Crowes, the key influence.
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