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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> We need more examples highlighted of entrepreneurs leading the slow-burn (in a good way) types of ventures.

There will be a lot more example of this in the coming years because the costs of keeping a pre-PMF webapp online have basically fallen to zero. Whereas when Zuckerberg started Facebook, if it didn't take off right away then you had no choice but to shut it down.

When you hear VCs and other folks cast doubt on the ability of anything that doesn't immediately capture lightning in a bottle to succeed in the long term, they are incorrectly pattern matching to a trend from the past that just happened to be an artifact of the economics of that time period.

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Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20k, paying a PR firm so that there’s a chance anyone will hear about your site will cost at least 20k etc etc

Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap (<$50/mo) tier, tons of helpful tools with free or cheap tiers, you can get users / customers for free on social media and probably more effectively than traditional ads / PR coverage.

It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if you don’t upgrade your stack a bit, market change could make you irrelevant etc

But in general there’s a lot of products that can simmer and slowly iterate for a long time as long as founder keeps chipping away as evidenced here.

Your perspective is refreshing. I realized I was in a rut seeing the opposite perspective, that costs via things like SOC2 compliance were driving up barriers to lifestyle like businesses.

It has gotten much cheaper to host stuff, but I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well. You can certainly find cheap or free avenues (like HN) to tell people about your product, but it can be lost in the sea of information. Good marketing to the best subset of potential customers is essential in getting anything off the ground. That can be expensive especially if you are an engineer with very little marketing experience.

My take is that marketing now can have very little out-of-pocket cost, but a massively increased time cost because you are now constantly engaging with people, making new posts, answering questions, exploring new avenues, etc.

> I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well

The overall cost of building a product and getting a product to PMF is higher, but the main cost is time. That's why it can be advantageous to just work on something for ten years rather than going out, raising a bunch of money, and shutting down two years later.

getting noticed by the right people cost-effectively is hard. Anything that makes it easier for you to get attention will also potentially make it easier for everyone else. So it will always be hard.

> you can get users / customers for free on social media

Mostly you can't, especially if you're a b2b SaaS.

If you're b2b, you only need one client to be profitable. Or so they say.

You only need one special client to be profitable. You might need to go through many other clients before you meet them.

LinkedIn has been wonderful for me.

There was plenty of inexpensive hosting when Facebook launched. You could run several tiny PHP/MySQL web apps on a single shared hosting account for <$10/mo, and Linode had recently launched, offering a VPS starting at $20/mo.

I recently migrated a little web app that has been online since before Facebook existed, away from the $5/mo shared hosting it had lived on since 2006.

My family’s dialup connection even came with free web hosting that ran Perl back in the 90s!

http://web.archive.org/web/20040612195543/http://www.linode....

Even back then, you did not have to grow as fast as VC made you think. It was a choice by Zuck to grow fast and take a lot of investment, he did not have to grow that fast.

This is Zuck's interview in 2005 in Stanford: >So, I mean when you’re 16 running a site and your core people are the kitchen table, your operating expenses are relatively low.

>[...] we just kept our operating expenses low so far and by doing that we’ve been able to stay cash flow positive for basically the entire system’s company

>[...] we decided that it was ok to go a few months in cash flow negative while [...] like you know, using like $100,000, not like millions. So, um and then but, now were back. We do a lot of page views.

See page 26: https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs/cyberhijack/2005-10-26-Zucker...

If your strategy involves needing to take advantage of network effects, growing as fast as possible seems like a requirement. It is a winner take all dynamic.

> If your strategy involved needing to take advantage of network effects, growing as fast as possible seems like a requirement.

Not necessarily. Most businesses with network effects (including Facebook) follow the "come for the tool, stay for the network" approach.

Right, but in any given group of people, the first people won't stick around to become the network unless they have reason to believe their network will shortly span their entire group -- i.e. grows fast.

This has been the case for over a decade. I've launched my first startup 11 years ago. I've used Linode and we've spent something like $20/month on hosting. (This has increased to around $80-$160 IIRC when we got funded, mostly due to the increased storage needs. We were a music startup and while S3 was pretty cheap back then too, it was easier to have everything on Linode at first. I.e. with enough funding, time was more expensive than storage.)

A bit more than a year later it went bust but I hoped I could still keep it alive, make it financially viable. I scaled back the infrastructure so costs would be below $30/mo again.

"PMF"?

product-market fit

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