jawn

This is a false choice.

There are more choices in your professional life than:

A) Being 9-5 daily grinder (for some reason this is always implied as being a bad programmer -- why?)

or

B) Working your ass off for some schmuck for terrible pay who gives you free snapple and a (perceived) enjoyable project.

In either case: THE FINANCIAL REWARDS ARE NOT GOING TO YOU - (Drinkers of the VC kool-aid this means you too).

To every passionate developer out there I challenge you to milk your 9-5. Then go home and make what YOU want, and live and die by that effort.

Take both of these perceived benefits for everything you can. The security and stability of the 9-5, and the sense of enjoyment/accomplishment/financial reward from your independant work.

Do not work for other people except as a means to a guaranteed paycheck.

Do not let others enslave your passion and creativity.

Hi I work in the log importation services business.

From my perspective the main hurdle to log aggregation/correlation is not scalability. If splunk doesn't cut it for your performance needs, you have probably hit the price point to where you can afford a loglogic or similar appliance.

Instead the barrier to entry is in the number of applications supported by a particular log archival product, and the ability to correlate across the different applications.

As I'm sure you know at this point, adding support for log types is a painstaking task. Most vendors punt on this and tell customers to do it themselves.

If there is a niche available to you as a startup I would think that it would be in offering a very low turnaround time in supporting new log types. For example: give us some log sources and we'll support and categorize your logs with our service.

As for running in the cloud on large datasets, I think you'll find that most customers are not going to want to double or triple their outgoing bandwidth -- In addition to concerns from a security compliance standpoint.

That being said, good luck in your venture. Logging is a mess, and could certainly use some clean up. :)

byoung2 did a great writeup on the overall process of site design outsourcing. It's viewable here http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=813690

Message out a clear value to your customers. I was prompted for personal information with no idea what I was receiving in return.

I think if you focus in on that clarity of message you'll see a good increase in sign-up conversions.