An Open Letter To Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) | Hacker News Reader

An Open Letter To Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)

messagefortony.com

31 pointskunle19 comments

Is HipMob funded? How do bootstrapped startups handle huge companies like Zappos? Would they be able to take on a client whose resource usage (in terms of hardware and people) would outstrip all the startup's current clients by a few orders of magnitude?

What if they find their architecture doesn't scale and they really can't handle it -- is it worth the risk of going under because you spent all your savings on servers and employees to handle this company-changing client, only to lose them immediately when things don't work out right away?

I guess that's why startups seek funding, eh? I'm not sure what I'd do if a Zappos wanted to sign up with one of my apps, honestly. Spend the money scaling up quickly for them, not knowing with certainty that I'd be able to keep ahead of their usage, or just turn them down?

Sorry I'm late to this question. I wanted to answer this: "How do bootstrapped startups handle huge companies like Zappos?" From my experience, big companies like working with small vendors because they can push them around. That may sound negative but the larger company can ask for features and the small company will be happy to oblige. That is what I have seen and heard in my own time.

Also in my experience it has been a waste of time to think about scaling. Big companies do not simply look at your website and tell the lackey engineer to integrate your product into their production product and pray for it to work. There are going to be many phases of adoption which your ability to scale will be tested.

Scaling is a nice problem to have, worry about making something people want first.

Hi there - Ayo from Hipmob here. You raise a fair question - we believe we can handle the scale challenge well (we're built on Heroku & AWS), and we've deployed with that in mind. That being said, only time (and deployments) will tell.

Hi Ayo. I don't mean to pick on Hipmob specifically. It's just a question your post raised that I have for startups in general, especially bootstrapped startups. I don't think I've ever seen a blog post or case study about how startups have handled landing major clients and while still small, relatively unproven teams & systems.

I'd love to know, for example, how a company like MixPanel or GinzaMetrics goes from handling a few million data points per customer, to perhaps billions. It seems like making the leap from helping other startups to helping Disney could take not just exponentially more resources, but a whole different architecture.

That is wrong. You should be eminently prepared for this question. At the very least, you should have estimated the scale you need to be able to support, and demonstrate that your systems can handle the load. This means spending development time and effort to create a scaling test environment, with instrumentation, and then spending time to present the results.

Didn't mean to sound dismissive. My reply wasn't stating that we're unprepared; we're absolutely prepared and we think about this ALL DAY. We're also seasoned enough to know that behaviors sometimes deviate from test environments while in the wild.

Cool approach - but my nitpick is the misquoting of Fry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfSzgV1q5g

Good luck. Definitely a creative attempt to land a client :)

Well played. Definitely a move to boost traffic to hipmob rather than a legitimate open letter to Tony, but I like the creative thinking behind the campaign.

Nice try! Although the iphone picture on your website is not clear/sharp. Do you need a photographer to take a better pic for you?

Hit me ayo[at]hipmob.com!!

Not sure if I just jumped into an employee upvoting scheme, but its a nice idea. Good luck!

Haha thanks. We dont (yet) have enough employees to have a scheme, but good idea. It's coming.

I'm excited to see if he responds

Haha thanks, we are too :)

I don't know if Zappos' CS infrastructure is the same as Amazon's, but if it is I will just say I feel getting this to integrate would be.... non-trivial.

CS infrastructure is quite a bit different from Zappos (Amazon doesn't provide live chat support for example from what I understand), and as entities, both their customer service philosophies (while focused on keeping the customer happy) are quite a bit different - Zappos is very high-touch, and Amazon is not.

Where's the printer friendly version? I'm not playing too-clever scrolling games.

great marketing!

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