Timeline for Is it common for the founder of a web app to lack technical expertise to scale it?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 16, 2014 at 10:48 | comment | added | johannes | @ArTs and others lost as they spent too much time on making their architecture "scalable" instead of bringing value to the user ;-) you have to navigate your path .. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:07 | comment | added | ArTs | @Brian Technically it takes the site down for a day. But it will alienate those 1 million users. It has happened before, businesses losing reputation before they take off, simply because they can't scale instantly. Its unfair, but this is the internet age, where people have the attention span of a squirrel! | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:07 | vote | accept | Heisenberg | ||
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:04 | comment | added | Brian | @ArTs: Meh, that usually only kills a site for a day. Even if your idea suddenly takes off, it's not going to instantly get an enduring 1 million daily users. Anything substantially less than that can be handled by expensive hardware upgrades. This is near-instant if your site is running on a VM (e.g., Amazon AWS). | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 10:26 | comment | added | Dr. ABT | 'the founder doesn't really contribute anything anymore but simply owning the business' The founder contributes vision at this point. This is the reason why he/she the founder and the hires are just hires. One had vision, the other merely had technical skill. Founding and growing a business requires far more than just a good idea. It requires vision: the ability to imagine the future and guide everyone in the same direction. The founder rightly reaps the rewards of ownership at this point, having put in the late nights and risking his/her pants when hires did not ;-) | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 10:18 | comment | added | ArTs | @Brian it also fails if the idea happens to be a great idea. Under those circumstances, it will typically fall victim to the slashdot effect if it cannot instantly scale. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 7:58 | comment | added | Brian | @Anh: A decent coder can, with some effort, produce a product which handles a giant chunk of users. By the time there is a scaling problem, revenue is coming in (from the users causing the scaling problem). This revenue is sufficient to A) pay an expert and B) upgrade the hardware to provide a buffer while the expert fixes the scaling problems. Of course, this strategy doesn't work for what Joel Spolsky calls the Amazon growth model (in which case the founder is relying on his good idea to get funding). | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 7:38 | comment | added | jwenting | @Anh at some point the founder becomes the outside face of the company, being more a public spokesman, marketing figure, and visionary rather than handling specific detail topics. IOW he becomes a CEO :) | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 5:44 | comment | added | Jack Scott | Hopefully the founder can still offer in-depth knowledge of both the problem domain and the business itself. It's also a common business saying that to grow and be successful you should be working on your business, rather than in your business. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 5:42 | comment | added | Heisenberg | That means the founder relies on his good idea to get funding, then use that funding to acquire talents to do the engineering? So when the business matures and becomes technical, the founder doesn't really contribute anything anymore but simply owning the business? (Not to pick on Twitter here but I'm trying to think what else can the founder add at this point.) | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 5:16 | history | answered | Jack Scott | CC BY-SA 3.0 |