mfrye0

I started off using Lambda as well and made the same sort of mistake. I can't remember exactly how much my bill was, but it was enough that it would have drained all my savings and effectively kill my startup. AWS was kind enough to write off most of it.

We now use Lambda only for simple cron / background tasks, or consuming from Kinesis. We use ECS for everything else. ECS is nice because it's relatively simple compared to K8, but still gives the full benefit of running multiple containers on one box.

I wrote a blog post last year about our migration over to ECS and experimenting with various ways to cut costs: https://blog.bigpicture.io/how-we-cut-our-aws-bill-by-70/

Yeah, good point.

In my case, I tried starting a company and failed. The learnings I gained helped me secure my next job. Leading up to the company failing though, it was more a less a year of misery.

Based on the original post, it sounds like he's looking for the easier path right now.

I was in a similar position in 2008. The key thing you need is experience, as people fresh out of college take awhile to ramp up and actually be productive.

I'd avoid small startups and focus on larger, established players. Unless they raised money before things started to get bad, smaller companies won't have the same resources as late stage orgs and FAANG.

While you're applying, try to get experience however you can. Work on personal projects relevant to jobs you're applying for and post them on Github. Pick up work on UpWork, etc at whatever price people are willing to pay. Having experience you can point to gives you a leg up over everyone else.

I run a data aggregation company that has a fairly advanced scraping infrastructure for collecting data across the web. Having built the scraping side, I'm pretty familiar with most of the strategies for avoiding bot detection.

Coming from that perspective, detecting and stopping at least the majority of bots out there is fairly doable, and I put together a rudimentary thing for a side project.

The core of it uses an IP API for looking up the requesting IP to identify the country and if it's coming from a data center, VPN, Tor, etc. If it passes that, I trigger Google Captcha to show up. Lastly, I track IPs that make it through and have some basic rules in place to try to detect patterns and block offenders that way.

There's a bunch more stuff you can check for, but the core of it is basically filtering out data center traffic to minimize the requests going to Google Captcha.

Seems like an interesting project, but so far the UX isn't great.

The searching UI for companies has no loading or success/failure indicators. A note on performance - waiting an extra second before firing the search request can help take some of the load off the server, along with cancelling requests after I change the search.

Some requests time out, and others return no results (e.g. HOOD, TLRY).

For other requests that returned results, there's no correlation (Apple).

Maybe an example page could be helpful to illustrate what the app can do?

I'm an engineer running my own business.

In my case it's an API as a service, and I've mostly bootstrapped the company. So I've been able to automate most things and keep the business type of work to a minimum.

There indeed is a bit of a learning curve, but I recommend learning the basics, even if you find a manager type to work with. My mentor would tell me that the business itself is a machine of sorts. So once you have a product providing value, "engineering the business" was an interesting way to look at it.

With that said, if you really want a business side partner, there are a number of ways to find one. First, let your network know that you're looking for one. Word will get around and someone may know someone.

Second, there are always startup networking events, and I've found that they are usually filled with business types looking for a technical cofounder.

Lastly, I've heard of a few firms now that are geared towards people like yourself that are technical and interested in starting a business for the first time. I recently met with some people at https://www.fractalsoftware.com, whose model is basically a business as a service. I haven't worked with them, so I can't comment yet, but I understand they can hook you up with a business idea, partners, funding, customers, and general advising.

I'm open to chat further and share my experience for anyone that's interested.

This looks great. I've had a similar idea, as we've had to build many of these utility tools internally for our team (address parsing / geocoding, Google search, proxies, etc). I wished there was just an easier, off the shelf, affordable option we could have reached for instead.

I'm the founder of BigPicture.io. We have APIs for looking up company data via domain, name, or IP address. I'm not sure if our APIs are potentially too "high level" for your platform, but I'm open to chat if you're interested in collaborating or just doing general user research.

Seems that you're getting the HN hug of death right now. The site is unusable.

Upload is a pretty good series on Amazon Prime right now that explores that. It's both amazing and horrifying.

Congrats Jeff. Funny seeing you pop up here after all those years back at Ambassador together.

Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product.

I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support.

The memes are true about this sort of thing.

Sure. michael <a t> bigpicture.io

A company DB can be expensive to buy and rapidly gets out of date. API is easier to integrate if you're building an app with company data, and easier on our end to keep the data fresh.

I'm still debating on what I want to do, but I'm open to chat if you're interested in any of this. michael <a t> bigpicture.io

I'm not sure if this is the best thread, but I'm potentially looking for a partner. I'm the founder of https://bigpicture.io/. The primary product is company data and IP data as a service via API.

I'm debating what to do with the company. I've only raised a small angel round, and the company is profitable. A competitor reached out to me about an acquisition a couple weeks ago, so I'm debating that vs raising money vs continuing to bootstrap.

I'm an engineer, but I have a decent amount of business experience. So I'm open to partnering with someone technical or business focused.

I tried to start a language learning app that would use product placement within lessons to make it free. The idea was to have VR style real world lessons such as how to order a beer - "I'd like a Heineken please".

I took it pretty far. My cofounder had a Phd in Computational Linguistics, we had professors from U of M as advisors, I got us into an accelerator, we built a working prototype, and I had several big ad companies interested.

The problem was that Duolingo came out at the exact time. Then due to our concept being immersive / media heavy, it required a lot of funding to build a v1. Ultimately, investors didn't think we'd be able to compete with Duolingo and we couldn't raise the funding.

I started the company almost 10 years ago now.

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SavvyLanguages/

Yes, this is how a lot of large companies work - I've worked at several like that.

As far as what to do, it depends on your comp. If you're still vesting, mentally check out and rest/vest until you make enough to feel comfortable. Depending on the company, it's pretty easy to get by doing nothing, and/or you can work on your own stuff on the side.

If you're not vesting anymore, the vesting amount is not worth it, or you prefer to move faster / do something, quit and get out.

Alternatively if you want to stay, a large company is a different game. Again depending on the company, but it's more about image, strategy, politics, and non technical sort of work.

While I get the argument for Rails, I find I'm much more productive when working in one language (Javascript) across both the frontend / backend.

As to the low level nature of Node/Express vs something like Rails or Django, I've tried SailsJS and Loopback, which are probably the closest comparisons in Node, and ending up regretting it. Every time I chose a high level API framework / ORM, I felt like I was fighting it or trying to find a workaround for the simplest things.

I now choose Express or Koa for most projects.

This. While I respect lawyers immensely, I think half the battle is deciding when to use a lawyer vs handling it yourself.

With that said, this guy definitely needs to consult with a lawyer.

Yeah, I was exaggerating. While my situation sucked, it definitely wasn't as bad is this.

My experience exactly, though they also asked for the same document multiple times.

I was tempted to do the same to my business partner. After he bailed on me the day before we were going to close a funding round, among other things.

I think about that quote from Elon sometimes, that starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

I bought a place with Better.com last year. While really cheap, I don't think I would use them again.

It seems like the model is to have a slick UI and hire contractors from India with second rate English skills handle the grunt work. There were multiple instances where there was miscommunication, no reply, or we couldn't get ahold of someone to get the current status. Overall it was really frustrating.

I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.

I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.

I believe I read somewhere that mail is trickier. Being that the spam mail essentially subsidizes USPS.

I agree with most people here. Definitely keep it simple.

With that said, I run a semi resource intensive operation, so I've invested a bit into dev ops to keep our costs down. My setup is currently on AWS, primarily using ECS, RDS, Elasticache. Infra is managed via Terraform.

I felt ECS was a nice balance vs K8s, as it's much simpler to manage, while getting the benefit of maximizing resource utilization.

For CI / deployment, I use Github Actions to build an image and push, then start a rolling refresh to update the containers to the new version. It was pretty easy to setup.

On DBs, RDS handles all the backups and maintenance. For migrations, I use https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate.

Happy to answer any other questions you have, as I've learned a lot through trial and error.

I've been thinking about doing the same.

Seems like most of answers here are BTC. Anything available in ETH yet? Or maybe XLM?

A Stripe for crypto would be awesome.

A friend introduced me to localblox.com a couple years ago to get some company data, though it looks like they have already closed up shop.

These guys seemed to have everyone's data. The demo started off by showing me the company data we were interested in, but then veered into picking a random person's life to delve into.

The deep dive began by showing work/education info, then went into where they live, the cars they drove, how many kids/pets, then even deeper into the location data...

They showed detailed maps of everywhere they went on a daily basis. The routes they took to work, they places the visited, etc.

Any of the data was for sale if we wanted it. It was beyond disturbing. We obviously passed on working with them.

Yeah, we're on Postgres, ElasticSearch, and Redis. Interesting. I'll definitely have the team check you guys out.

Hey everyone. Author here.

There's been some recent posts on HN around this topic, which I've commented on to share what we've learned.

A few people suggested I convert it into a blog post to provide more detail. Open to any thoughts, or suggestions for further improvements / optimizations.

That would be a great writeup. If someone tracked them down and figure out why they failed, how many were bought out, etc.

I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to learn in there.