How Hacker News and FreshDesk led me to quit my job and launch my own startup | Hacker News Reader

How Hacker News and FreshDesk led me to quit my job and launch my own startup

maaxmarket.com

48 pointslenin123453 comments

Can someone suggest a better hosting platform for us? It don't think Godaddy is helping us scale. We are on the ultra premium hosting option and the site cannot even handle 100 users at the same time.

Hosting like godaddy tends to not differ in performance between their lowest and highest packages, they just differ in cheap resources such as space, bandwidth, "number of allowed email accounts" etc. Processor, memory consumption and maximum concurrent users don't change.

Do you know anyone that is familiar with setting up VM's or managing servers? If so, hit them up and get them to set you up a linode vm (or whatever other provider you want) with nginx. If you don't, perhaps looking at getting a contractor to set you up.

DigitalOcean (and probably others) have a pre-prepared web server VM you can spin up

Digital Ocean hits the sweet spot for me with both pricing, availability, speed, and ease of getting up and running for a project like this. You can have a new server up and running in 30 seconds and locked down within 10.

Bryan Kennedy has a great write up to help you get it set up and locked down: http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen...

We put our own twist on it which improves on his base (mostly security related): https://github.com/codelittinc/incubator-resources/blob/mast...

This kind of worries me as a tech company, you have no devops guy?

We are currently migrating our website to a better hosting platform. Should be up and running in 20 mins

awesome ;)

In the short term, switching most pages to static html would do wonders for speed and let you work out a long-term strategy. Static pages behind something like nginx should handle any load.

Your problem might not be your host (thought Godaddy is unlikely to be good), as much as a lack of caching on whatever website software you're using (WP?).

You can slap a caching plugins on wordpress and make 99.99% of requests never hit the database... usually takes you from being able to serve 10 requests per core to a few 100.... (Not as good as static HTML, but I am not sure he needs the million pages per second yet)

Yes sure, by short-term I meant for the next few hours - static html might be an easier option when the server is on fire. Think of it as a poor man's caching :)

That definitely sounds like a good option. Let me do that now

+1 to codelitt's suggestion. We've been running our stack for Tenreads (http://tenreads.io) on DO since the last year now. Wouldn't say we are running a high throughput flow for our backend/web apps, but with our core pipelines, DO has been a really good choice with, to quote codelitt again, "sweet spot of cost and performance".

PS: We've been facing issues with certain regions of late, but the team is fairly responsive and helpful with getting fixes through.

Use DigitalOcean ( Cheap & reliable but sometimes I feel that my speeds are capped ), But if you need high performance you should go with Dedicated server ( Online.net or OVH )

P.S I've been using Digitalocean for about 19months now. (edit)

As a counterpoint to all the DigitalOcean suggestions, I prefer https://www.vultr.com over DO.

(not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer)

I have considered vultr.. other than a few dollars cheaper, is there any other killer feature?

The things that most annoy me about digital ocean (No S3 like thing, no way to change your ratio of CPU to Memory to Disk) seem the same.

Edit - Noticed the giant hard drive instances. Super interesting. That could be enough to make me flip.

I used DO for a few years and had wild network performance swings at various times. Vultr has been much better in that regard. I also prefer Vultr's administration panel over DO's. They have more datacenter locations, too.

Hum very tempting, may have to spin up a few boxes and see how it looks

joyent?

A little advice: state what you do in the first sentence. Lost my interest after one paragraph.

Sure. Thanks for the advice. I was trying to post my experience in launching a startup and not detailing into what the startup does. We are working on simplified marketing automation platform that does email and social media automation depending on customer's online behavior. Very similar to marketo and pardot but simplified and priced for small business

I really don't understand what the whole product is about - I don't think you communicated that very well - but never the less congrats and good luck!

We are still in the process of updating our site. Your point is duly noted. Our product actually automates repetitive marketing tasks like emails, social media posts like tweets / facebook etc... depending on leads's behavior. We are building something similar to marketo and pardot but more simple to use and very cost effective.

When I click the "Beta Sign Up" button, it opens TWO modal overlays. I noticed this because it broke tab order when I was filling out the form.

Happens in both Chrome and FF 41 on OSX. I was able to close one of the overlays and successfully submit the other one.

Thanks for noting it. We are fixing it right away :)

Nice post, congratulations and all the very best for your venture. I'm from Chennai too and at some point plan on starting a company there, it was nice to read through the planning, experience etc. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you so much.

How's your experience with legalzoom? I'm in the process of incorporate my side project, and as a not US person I'm looking on the best way to do it. From opening the company, the bank account (without having to take a plane and go to the US just for that), and also all the work that needs to be done during the year (taxes, accounting, and I guess many more)

The process has been fairly simple. You need to have atleast one person having SSN in order to incorporate the company. I can help you with more details on type of corporation, bank account and few other details. Please email me lenin@maaxmarket.com

You might want to get some caching on that WP site. And decent hosting so it's not so horribly slow to use, under virtually no load.

You might also want to explain what it is your software actually does. "Marketing Automation" is fairly broad in scope.

I thought the exact same thing while loading up the page. However, I think you should change a few words in your post in an attempt to improve the tone. It reads kinda mean, but maybe that's just me, or maybe that's what's acceptable on HN these days?

I'm not trying to be "PC police" or anything, but when we write comments about people's stuff we need to have a little empathy. I think this would make HN a better, friendlier place.

Btw, I'm not trying to start a fight or argument. I just saw this as an opportunity to call something out that I've noticed on HN far too frequently.

We just moved on to the best hosting package available in Godaddy. But the site is still slow :(

They want us to move to a VPS and we need to migrate our site to a better server soon

I would recommend trying Webfaction (for a simpler option), DigitalOcean or AWS instead of GoDaddy

What is the difference between "startup" and, say, "company"?

It's my understanding that you're working on your "startup" until you've found a repeatable way to generate profits. Once that occurs you then begin working on your "company".

I think there isn't an exact definition but generally a startup has theoretical hyper growth potential. So opening your own bakery would not qualify, envisioning a franchise chain of bakeries (or a social network etc.) would.

[I don't particularly like this definition but that is the common understanding AFAIK]

Startups focus on high growth. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I like the story, but I think you should explain upfront what the service is. Most people have a 8 second attention span, so you want to get the point of what your service does across in a fast way.

Sure thing. Point noted. We are working on marketing automation platform similar to marketo and pardot, but simplified for small businesses and at an affordable price point.

I have a prototype of the product that you can check out at http://demo.maaxmarket.com/app

First of all, congratulations. Can you tell us more about why you chose Chennai? Does it have a good startup ecosystem?

yeah... chennai has a better startup ecosystem compared to other metros. More than that, this is where I grew up. I was able to convince few of my college friends to join me and help me get this venture started.

First of all My Hearty Felicitation and the logo seems to be much perfect. Wish you all for your future endeavors.

Thanks a trillion!

There are quite some broken links on your website (for instance careers link). You might want to fix them.

Yes. We are fixing those links right now. We will be changing that very shortly. Thank you so much for your feedback

Is there a mirror for this? Or has the URL changed? I am getting a 404…

Please allow 5 mins. we are hosting the server right now in Microsoft Azure. We will keep you posted when the site is up. Our site crashed due to huge volume of traffic

The site is now up and running. We have now migrated to Azure.

This is very good to hear. Good luck.

Thank you so much. We are in the prototyping phase and will be launching the product very soon

Great post! A minor correction - the name of the language is Go, not golang. Also, Chennai le enda area?

From my understanding golang is a perfectly fine name for Go and much easier to Google.

right, try searching for go instead of "golang" or "go lang"

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