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Comment by kunle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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