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Let's consider an entrepreneur decides to create a new company like Airbnb, Netflix, etc. The problem is about the software part. He doesn't know how long it takes to create the mobile/web app? How many frontend developers, backend developers, devops engineers, graphic designers, etc. are needed to be hired and work on the project? How much is their salary? How much do they need to buy/rent properties like servers, software licenses/subscriptions, etc.?

Where can he find the answer of these and similar questions? Should a software engineer answer them all? If so, how the software engineer collects all the information? Does he/she know these information from his/her previous experience or will he/she go and ask from other guys? From who?

I am a CS graduated and like to be an entrepreneur. I have an idea and I can write a mobile/web application for my idea. But I know it may work for only 1000 user and can't work for a millions/billions of users, because working on that scale applications need a lot of expertise and hundreds(maybe thousands?) of engineers working on it like big tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

My problem is this huge gap between an app written by one person at home( That can support thousand of people) and an app written by hundreds of developers in a big tech company( That supports billions of people).

I don't know if I want to bring my application to an investor and he/she asks me about the amount of investment, the number of people should be hired, the costs of property we got to buy/rent, etc. what should I answer? Because I really don't know what is the process of moving from an app supports thousand of users to an app that supports millions of them?

Please help me to find out my answers or at least to know where/how can I find them?

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    It's not too difficult to write a somewhat scalable app. The 12 Factor App is a good summary of helpful principles, even though it's over a decade old at this point. Since then, we've also seen an explosion of cloud-native technologies, which often allows you to trade capex and time for opex (i.e. allowing you to rent services on a pay as you go basis). Renting also makes it easy to dissolve the startup when the business idea doesn't work out. Estimating time/cost is really hard in any case, common response is to focus on delivering value as quickly as possible (agile) Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 22:54
  • I’m voting to close this question because i don't think it fits with any of the topics strictly speaking about software engineering. The question is introducing a problem from the financial point of view. There's no technical issue to approach with engineering. It took me to do an MBA to learn how to estimate a project. Estimating the cost of creating companies and business plans might take a career. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 12:10

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If you ever get to the point where you've got 1,000 people using your app, you can hire some people who can get it to scale to 100,000.

If you ever get to the point where you've got 100,000 people using your app, you can hire some people who can get it to scale to 10,000,000.

etc. Your app doesn't have to scale to billions of people today, because right now you have zero users. Make it work for the first 10, then the first 1,000 before you start worrying about how you're going to scale to billions.

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  • I agree, but there is only one problem I can't solve. My app has a new idea. There are other giant companies in this section they can copy my idea and add it to their current apps easily. Because of that I am thinking if I want to start with my own and start to advertise it and find 10 user per day, those big companies may see and copy the idea and my startup will fail without even reaching to 1000 user. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 1:21
  • Also I am still looking for my answers. I don't know how to estimate how many people with what expertise are needed to scale an app from 1000 to 100,000? Because the investors will ask this because they should know how much money they should spend? Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 1:24
  • Investors don't (shouldn't) expect you to have all the answers. One of the things you look for.when choosing an investor is someone who can fill in the gaps in your skill set. Go and watch some Dragon's Den / Shark Tank / whatever its called in your market. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 5:31
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    Without wanting to be too harsh: if your only route to success is "do an easily copiable thing before Big Tech does", you don't have a business model. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 10:23
  • "if I want to start with my own and start to advertise it and find 10 user per day, those big companies may see and copy the idea" - welcome to the real world. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 13:33

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