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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#71

Post by civilitty »

tptacek wrote: post #53
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?

I assume their writers can expand it beyond “We’re going to fuck you over, but thanks for all the fish!” Make it sound all smart and snarky and stuff.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#72

Post by dools »

Have you had a crack at making VoIP call quality better globally? It’s one of those things you can’t cache but I bet there are still some fancy things you can do to speed it up.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#73

Post by stephen »

I really like their acknowledgement that they expected to be used for game/edge caching/etc, but in reality everyone is using them as a new Heroku to deploy Rails+PG crud apps.

Afaiu they're asserting their next goal is to make edge-ify-ing Rails+PG apps trivial / a "two hour problem".

That's pretty bold...historically that's required very app/framework/domain-specific concerns/coupling around "what's the best way (if possible) to shard this domain model", and solving it as PaaS/IaaS basically means writing/running a distributed CloudSQL / Aurora.

Which I guess if it's "just" running an Aurora clone/neon seamlessly in their stack, that seems doable/achievable + very worthwhile as a value-add/product.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#74

Post by mrkurt »

hgsgm wrote: post #62
mrkurt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power. I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.

Are you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for your existing customers? Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience? Or do you lock in customers?

We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to. You can buy 'em from a million different places.

It's pretty easy to move off, though. `fly launch` generates a Dockerfile you can run pretty much anywhere.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#75

Post by hgsgm »

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…

That math works for any old blog post.

Advertising a raise specifically is to get attention from customers and the industry as a legitimized successful operation.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#76

Post by tptacek »

hgsgm wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about peopl…

Does PR know you are posting this? Number of restaurants is a measurement of hosting quality? Uptime doesn't matter?

This is neither here nor there, but every time I read a comment like this, all I can think about is that scene in The Office where Dwight Schrute is screaming into his cell phone "Are you saying you invented paper?!"

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#78

Post by [deleted] »

hgsgm wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about peopl…

Does PR know you are posting this? Number of restaurants is a measurement of hosting quality? Uptime doesn't matter?

[deleted]

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#79

Post by afterburner »

yieldcrv wrote: post #10
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

> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?

Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#80

Post by nickpeterson »

mrkurt wrote: post #52
nickpeterson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s from the Joker school of money management. Although I believe he only burns his half.
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