Posted by tradertef 15 hours ago
Initially from the title, I thought it would be about brainstorming and launching a successful idea, and that sort of thing.
Dead giveaway
Which obviously works, it's not like there aren't tons of multi-million startups ultimately doing the exact same thing, and yet. It feels a bit... trite?
Honestly, yes. I'm on HN for tech content, I don't really care about startups and the business side of things, even though sometimes there are interesting reads on this side as well. Also, it may very well be the case that I rediscover the meaning of MRR for the second or third time in sixteen years :).
Its like not having syphilis or cancer, its a good thing.
Consistency is key for the grindset.
But, in all honesty, all RR numbers are estimates. MRR is also a "made up number" from a certain point of view: it is not equivalent to cash received every month, because of annual subscriptions, cancelations, etc.
Sure, but I would expect you to have at least one data point or at least near it, before making any estimates for that timescale. I don't see many people make MRR projections based on 2 days of of sales, it's just something I've noticed with startups and ARR.
It starts about cutting costs by the choice of infrastructure and goes further to less resource hungry tools and cheaper services. But never compares the cost of these things. Do I save actually the upgrade to a bigger server by using Go and sqlite over let's say Python and postgres? Or does it not even matter when you have just n many users. Then I do not understand why at one point the convenience of using OpenRouter is preferred over managing multiple API keys, when that should be cheaper and a cost point that could increase faster than your infrastructure costs.
There are some more points, but I do not want to write a long comment.
"What do you even need funding for?"
I agree. The author claims to have multiple $10K MRR websites running on $20 costs. I also don't understand what he needs money for — shouldn't the $x0,000 be able to fund the $20 for the next project? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Then the author trails off and tells us how he runs on $20/month.
Well, why did you apply for funding? Hello?
Building a $10K MRR website is hard. Building multiple (assuming "multiple" here means >= 3) $10K MRR websites is extremely hard.
I don't know which investors they pitched to, but most investors seeing that number will write a 100-200K check to invest in THE PERSON pretty immediately; unless there was strong red flags in their business model (porn, drug, gambling, etc...)
He does not say what kind of funding he has been trying to get, but if my presumption is right, then some kind of Y-Combinator style hypergrowth.
I think the response he got is sensible if he was approaching "Excel investors" who are risk averse, not targeting hypergrowth.
In other words, what gets you to $10k MRR isn’t the same thing(s) for 2x, 5x, or 10x that.
$20 x 1000 => $20,000 // not more than what they make a month even if "multiple" here means 2
And, not sure I'm correct, but I felt Postgresql has more optimized storage if you have large text data than SQLite, at least for me I had storage full with SQLite, but same application on Postgresql never had this issue
Something to remind to many tech folks on HN
Since I'm in finance I would say, Turnover is vanity, positive cashflow is sanity...but its not nearly as catchy
But 10k MRR sounds to me like travelling to Mars. I have 0 ideas and 0 initiative to push them ahead.
I can build whatever, I just have zero clue whatsoever what to build. Never have.
It seems to me that I am getting much more good ideas than I can carry on.
Same as 95+% of people.
So comfortable that lately I have declined offers for interesting and much much better paid work, because I can no longer be bothered to take any risks or alter my lifestyle.
But sometimes I wish I could have been the guy managing to get 10k MMR using knowledge I've got in spades.
The moral of the story is: Don’t be (another) fool, your tech stack is not your priority.
But, actually you can run Kubernetes and Postgres etc on a VPS.
See https://stack-cli.com/ where you can specify a Supabase style infra on a low cost VPS on top of K3s.
I guess it’s all about knowing when to re-engineer the solution for scale. And the answer is rarely ”up front”.
I was thinking more of
Running multiple websites. i.e. 1 application per namespace. Tooling i.e. k9s for looking at logs etc. Upgrading applications etc.
You can view application logs with anything that can read a text file, or journalctl if your distro is using that.
There are many methods of performing application upgrades with minimal downtime.
0: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/namespaces.7.html
The authors stack left me thinking about how will he re-start the app if it crashes, versioning, containers, infra as code.
I've seen these articles before... the Ruby on Rails guys had the same idea and built https://kamal-deploy.org/
Which starts to look more and more like K3s as time goes on.
Scaling to zero with database persistence using litestream has cut my bill down to $0.1 per month for my backend+database.
Granted I still don't have that many users, and they get 200ms of extra latency if the backend needs to wake up. But it's nice to never have to worry about accidental costs!
No regrets. Infrastructure isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. The problem is: who's actually going to pay for this?
Optimizing infrastructure before you have customers is like designing a kitchen before you've written the menu. I launched within 72 hours of starting development and went straight to customer validation. The market feedback started coming in immediately.
Infrastructure costs show up in your bill. The cost of slow customer validation doesn't show up anywhere - until it's too late. That's the number I watch.
The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narrative that help them justify their choices. This position is just as dogmatic, if not more, than the alleged dogma it attempts to disrupt.
Smart technical leaders knows that technical decisions only matter in context never in absolutes. The right answer is always “it depends”.
I can agree that there is a tendency to prematurely optimize infra, as a direct consequence of lack of measuring especially in young busy startups. One could argue that premature optimization might be the smart choice when you don’t have enough data, as in the best case scenario (your startup do well) you’ve saved some time, worst case scenario you’ve lost some money that depending on the situation might be less valuable than time spent in maintaining, and later refactoring, infra.
Can confirm it exists, especially with founders self-coding with LLMs now.
And since it tends to reach for the most web-represented solution, that means infinite redis caches doing the same thing, k8s, and/or Vercel.
Best mental model: imagine something that produces great tactical architecture, with zero strategic architecture, running in a loop.
Most people in the BiP these days barely know how to deploy a database or host something using nginx. it's all vercel, supabase, aws, clerk, yada yada. Cost aside, I think that people are addicted to complexity.