An Email got us $5k in AWS Credits | Hacker News Reader

An Email got us $5k in AWS Credits

formcake.com

102 pointsCoreSet62 comments

An important takeaway is to "send out any email at all".

Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly lead to them signing a 5 figure deal with us which was everything to a tiny startup not making anything :)

Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up.

"Send out any email at all" but please, do NOT make it look spammy. And don't send the same email to multiple people.

Showing up is half the battle. Even more true today.

Cannot agree more with the concept of just showing up. It's remarkable what you can get done by being, friendly, open, honest, just asking, and then delivering.

This applies to so many things. It's incredible how far you can get with a simple question. Worst case scenario, you get a "no", and nothing changes. Best case, you can get something like 5K from AWS.

In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or AWS.

Good on Stripe and Atlas for making this more available to more bootstrapped companies like the one in this post, but there's certainly a huge difference between $1k or $5k and $100k.

On the one hand I understand why cloud providers have to limit this, they're trying to buy lock-in and have to choose startups that they think have a larger chance of growing big enough for this to be profitable. Even a successful bootstrapped company will normally not grow as large as a successful VC-backed company, and will probably be smarter with their money as well and not rack up enormous AWS bills so quickly.

But on the other hand, this is an almost invisible example of the kind of gatekeeping that helps those who are starting from a position of privilege (i.e. have the connections to raise a large seed round) and gives them a leg up over everyone else. If as a tech community we're striving to make starting a company more meritocratic and make sure there is a low barrier to entry for everyone, I wonder if there's a better way to distribute these kinds of perks?

> In case anyone doesn't know this, for just about any venture-backed company that has gone through YC or another incubator or raised from an early-stage VC, you can pretty much automatically get $100k of credits from Google or AWS.

This seems very backward, because you also don’t really need those credits anymore at that point.

$100k is another employee for free. That's a significant sum for an early stage startup.

Why should startups backed by powerful institutional capital get more credits from AWS than ones that are bootstrapped and hurting for cash much more?

AWS credits aren't charity. They're an investment by Amazon that they hope will lead to future AWS revenue.

Because they’re more likely to succeed and spend real cash with AWS later.

Amazon’s a business, not a charity.

The whole point is to get you hooked in the first place.

Scenario

1. You succeed, your startup is now worth something ( big or small ), you will be dealing with scaling issues, people issues, marketing issues, profits issues or gazillion of other small things, the last thing you want is switching your infrastructure provide.

2. You failed, or burn through those cash, but not to worry, since your are backed by incubator or early stage VC, the likely hood of you getting another round of funding is high. And those will be used on AWS anyway.

There are very little downside to AWS but lots of upside.

I got $20k in AWS credits just by insisting. I was bootstrapped at the time.

How?

My friend is a solutions architect at AWS. He put me in touch with whoever is responsible for the plan. Had a 5 minute phone call with them and got approved for the credits.

Judging by how big AWS is, I'm sure everyone knows someone who works there.

That assumption is exactly the point, isn't it?

It's just a way to have free vetting. If you have a bunch of cash to deliver to startups in order to reap the rewards of lock-in a few years down the line, which do you do?

1) Ask for applications and pay people to mass review applications to pick which startups are more likely to succeed

2) Have 1) be done by proxy for you for free, by only giving it out to startups who a professional "startup success predictor person" has already invested in

They've chosen to go with 2.

This type of infrastructure credits can really accelerate a bootstrapped startup, unfortunately almost every major provider of such freebies have now moved on to 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC' type model.

Google was the first to move that way, now Microsoft has cancelled its Bootstrap program and even Facebook has done away with its Startup Accelerator program in favour of 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC we approve of' model.

I was personally benefitted by Facebook's aforementioned Accelerator program. I applied for my previous startup's privacy focused chat-app-network dating platform for their bootstrap phase, but they directly approved it for their Accelerator phase through which I received $80,000 worth benefits incl. $15,000 AWS credits on which I ran my product; these kind of help makes life or death difference for a disabled soloprenuer from a village in India running bootstrapped startup(Facebook doesn't know this).

Now anyone in my position is at the mercy of some Accelerator or VC.

Dude. WHAT are you doing.

I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.

If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?

Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?

You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.

I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.

I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.

I think you might be overreacting to this, he said Facebook didn't know his situation, that doesn't mean he lied about it. It's not really necessarily relevant where he's from or what disabilities he has.

I told Facebook doesn't know "I'm disabled" that's all, To imply I got selected meritoriously.

Obviously everything about my Startup was part of my application details, since my application was hosted on Facebook platform(messenger app) it knew the statistics as well and I believe that's the reason it got selected.

Then again, its Facebook we are talking about here, it might even know what I had for breakfast the day I applied.

But I believe you made that comment out of concern of my well-being, I appreciate that and I apologise if my sentence formation caused unnecessary confusion.

P.S. I use my real name here to own accountability of the things I write here and to ensure I don't compromise my integrity in the lure of anonymity/pseudo-anonymity(No offence to anyone who don't use their real name, I understand).

Understood. Definitely an overreaction on my part. Just a little weary from how exclusive these applications can be and what the consequences can look like.

No need to apologize.

Wish you well.

> Send that one last email. Even if it seems like a bit much, or things are settled, just be sure you ask and give the other person a chance to help you in ways you can't predict

Good lesson for budding founders or indie devs.

Shows you the power of "Just ask". If you don't ask, the answer is always no.

Nice to hear Stripe actually caring for their customers.

Besides that, I think your product serves a wonderful niche. Had the exact problem of hosting a static site for a customer and actually needed to host a full Python backend eventually to receive form submissions. In the future I'll just use formcake.

when I worked for a startup, an email got us $250K in credits. That was enough to run the compute for the company for at least a year. Now, we had a nice deal with our VCs, and AWS really liked us, but it really was a "asking made the difference".

> Stripe monitored the developer community enough to see our initial posts

If I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.

I can't think of any other company that bends over backwards to please engineers who use their platform (and, by extension, the people who visit this site) more than Stripe. Back in 2013, when my co-founder and I started a company and later got into YC, my co-founder went thru every circle of hell in order to fix all the mistakes we made when we incorporated. If Stripe Atlas had existed back then and we'd used it, this would just be a non-issue. Unless you're an expert in the technicalities of startup incorporation/bylaws/etc, the value Stripe Atlas provides is huge and it just doesn't make sense to me why someone would pass on it.

The issue here is really with AWS. These credit promises are all over every startup perk program - paid or free.

Ultimately it is up to AWS's activate team to approve or deny the credits.

In our experience, we were denied extra credits by the AWS activate team and the perk program we had joined specifically for the credits gave us a full refund.

I don't think anyone is saying to "rely" on free money - but if you have a shot at it then at least send the email.

Good old email and persistence.

Wonder how much bitcoin an unscrupulous person could mine with that $5k of credits.

Less than $5k

But 5k in credits is worthless to someone who doesn't need them, so even if it's 1c, that's something. (Or really, so long as it's more than you can sell the account for.)

Interesting point. What's the going rate on AWS accounts that come with credits? Is there a marketplace for this?

IIRC credits are non-transferable for exactly this reason, and also why billing information is required (even if you have credit). "Selling" a full account with credits (or access to that account to use the credits) would be super risky since it's still tied back to you, you will definitely be selling for less than the credit amount, and you would be on the hook if AWS invalidated those credits after-the-fact.

Maybe in the order of $50 rough estimate, that is 2 orders of magnitude less.

Bitcoin is designed to cost the price of electricity when mining on dedicated ASIC miners.

AWS costs are covering enterprise hardware with extra services, electricity is not one tenth of that, and AWS is using general purpose CPU (maybe GPU instances) which are not one tenth as efficient as ASIC.

More to the point, as-far-as-I-know this activity is monitored for, and using promotional credits for these purposes will invalidate your credits and you'll receive a large bill.

Source: A previous employer got a notification that our instances had been flagged as mining cryptocurrency, and they wanted to invalidate a low-six-figure amount of credits, and back-bill. Note that no cryptocurrency was actually being mined, and I don't know what heuristic they got caught in (although I have suspicions).

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