leonardteo

I had less savings than you did before starting our company 10 years ago. I was 30 and living in Canada also. But our path was not "quit paying job > make a product > hope it breaks even!" We started by taking development consulting gigs and bootstrapping until we made our product. For product, it took years before it broke even, and consulting gigs/revenue kept us alive and profitable; and it wasn't the first product we made - which was a failure. We're now ~40'ish people.

My advice if you are going to start a company and bootstrap it: cashflow is king. Ensure that you always have cashflow. Funded startup is an entirely different beast where the company itself is the product - so you can burn like crazy because you're (supposed to be) creating value in the business/IP itself.

It's something to think about! :)

It depends on who is working on it. :) For devs who are comfortable with bare/close-to-metal clusters and networking, it's really not complex (and why over the years it's just not been an issue for me to just hack on it on the side). But for other devs, just the context switching from working on application domains becomes an overhead you can't ignore. Then when you factor in all the other overheads of assigning a "team" to it which includes scrum events, refinement, just talking about it ends up driving the cost up.

It is a little bit more complex now - e.g. I added on-the-fly image resizing routines. But the core concepts of caching on multiple pops, being able the purge, etc. no it is not fancy tech by any stretch of the imagination.

Yessir, reporting in. Thanks for the thumbs up.

I personally use OVH.com and Hetzner (for EU based installations). Don't expect support, but you get good machines, unlimited traffic (OVH). If you can set up your infrastructure so that it's JBOS (Just a Bunch of Servers) where you can hot swap them if there's any hardware failure, etc. it's great price/performance.

5 years ago I built our own company CDN using bare metal clusters hosted in multiple POP's that was 1/10th the cost of using commercial CDN's. It brought us ahead by literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and it serves us extremely well (continues to this day). The problem is that I am the CEO of the company which has now expanded to 45 people and to date, I've been unsuccessful at assigning a team to manage this piece of tech due to economics. At the point where I have to get engineers to work on the CDN, it becomes cheaper to move to a commercial CDN where it becomes someone else's problem. But at the moment, it ain't broke, the team loves the stability of it and it continues to save us hundreds of thousands of dollars every year....

Really neat work! :)