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> I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale.

Do some maths.

Get one (1) small EC2 instance on the free tier. Deploy the test version there. Keep adding test clients until the thing is maxed out (presumably on CPU for your application?). That gives you a ceiling for "peak usage". You may find this is surprisingly high.

Come up with a ballpark figure for how many client requests a normal user will make in a day.

You can now start producing cost numbers for using various solutions, from AWS to dedicated hosting. If you don't have deep pockets, do not choose an option which can incur unlimited bills.

Before you can even think of selling it to someone, you need to have a compelling revenue story. Not actual revenue, but a convincing path to revenue. These days that's usually advertising. Can you bung some ads in there from Google to cover startup costs?

Which would you rather have, the system page you in the middle of the night to add more instances manually, or the system do it on your behalf without regard to cost?

> Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work?

Nobody is going to give a line of credit to a brand new company (LLC or not) without a personal guarantee from the owner.

> All that said, I'm almost certain that a successful demo at scale with the Internet thrown at it will get me money.

I would not rack up $100k of personal debt to get to a demo.

But maybe don't listen to me, I'm a 40 year old programmer with a few failed attempts at bootstrapping behind me. Quite possibly at least one of those died due to being capital starved :)

I think you are over confident on the "public face" of your app, and not the "private side" of it. You are saying it would be great and people would talk about it because it is really cool.

I am not saying that's not true - but that isn't enough to make it a product (or being bought out). Some of the most popular products out there aren't hard to do. The complicated part is how to scale them to be as fast with that many users and don't lose money. Twitter? It could be done in a few months (I am not saying it is a weekend project), but that doesn't mean you have Twitter. The hard part of Twitter is not tweet, publish, have followers, is doing in almost realm time with that amount of data. You could say almost the same for YouTube (Upload and play video? Easy. Do it for millions of video at the same time... oops!).

Try to optimize your backend, so it doesn't cost much money. If not, you have just something that does something nice but it doens't do it well. Many people can do that. The secret of success is doing great things without consume many resources.

I would adjust my AWS service limits to prevent scaling past a certain number of instances. Set the limit to serve enough hypothetical users to demonstrate the demo is successful but prevents you from going bankrupt (better to load shed extra users than to end up with a bill you can't pay). If there is no number of instances that fits that criteria, I would consider rearchitecting to be cost conscious (I've heard positive things about Lambda-based services for keeping costs down).

I don't think your problem is unique. I have a few ideas that if I could only get substantial funding for just might work. That said:

>Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work? Then fold without harm or fowl if it doesn't? Is that unethical?

Any bank worth their salt won't simply hand over a huge line of credit for an idea. Banks are risk averse, that's why VC exists. But hey, if you are honest with your plan and they give you money, this is the route.

Approaching VC with a small scale demo is a fantastic idea!

I'm hoping for a quick viral demo, press coverage, and then either more funding or a quick exit. Enough funding to handle the intital traffic will absolutely accomplish what I want.

I've already written the app, so I can show it off.

This is a great idea! Thanks so much! :)

Go simpler and go cheaper. Why not do real-time processing for all of 2 minutes. That's about the length of an elevator pitch and shouldn't cost so much.

Or limit the number of beta users there can be.

Or work some freelance jobs for a few months and save up the cash and during that time pitch to investors. As you progressively have more cash you can hire an engineer to part-time hack on cool demos or to give you the opportunity to increase the number of beta users.

You need plumbing, not a pile of clever rust code.

TL;DR Pay someone who knows how to work with baremetal servers, convert your $100k/mo AWS bill to $20k/mo infrastructure geek bill + < $10k/mo infrastructure bill.

It will give you a longer runway.

onboard customers slowly and charge them - as you scale, make sure your charging as well and get paid.

you don't need to go from 0 - 100k a month in a single month, octopus could because they have backing.

octopus is a bootstrapped company

This is a social media app, so I can't charge money for it. My hope would be for funding or a buyout. Otherwise it will be shut down.

Just stop what you are doing, you need to have a way to generate revenue if you want to sell it.

Trying to wrap my head around this: someone needs to make money from it, or what would they be buying out? So why not you?

If you need funding, then you have to build a compelling case sans demo. It's not unheard of.

> This is a social media app, so I can't charge money for it. My hope would be for funding or a buyout.

If you have no clue how to monetize it, why would anyone fund it or buy it? People fund or buy businesses, but without a plan for monetization, you don't have a business.