Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

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One of the most important lessons I've learned during the growing-up phase of my being an entrepreneur -- and one of the first things I'm doing with my next startup -- is putting together a list of "doomsday scenarios" right off the bat.

What are the _single_ actions / events / scenarios that could kill your business overnight?

I emphasize single because every business is going to have the potential for a series of unforeseen events kill them (i.e. Microsoft would probably not have seen 'Apple releases a phone' as a business/Balmer-killer), but every business should be keenly aware of the single-points-of-failure (SPoF).

It seems obvious, but so many folks either willfully ignore or choose to pretend that SPoF don't exist or rationalize the scenario away.

Examples:

* You run on AWS in a single availability zone, and that availability zone goes down for a week ("The cloud is super reliable. Amazon won't go down.")

* Your CTO is the only person on the company who knows the product, and he quits overnight / gets injured / becomes incapacitated. ("He's my partner. He'd never abandon the business. We're in this together.")

* You rely solely on Facebook / Twitter / Apple App Store and are at the mercy of their changes in policy ("Oh Facebook would never just shut us down.")

* You're built solely on the Foursquare Places API. ("Foursquare won't just kill all the companies that rely on their API...right?")

Etc. etc. etc.

Now, this isn't saying that you should be paralyzed by the potential for SPoFs to hurt your business -- it may make sense to proceed even with them around (i.e. lots of people have made a lot of money building FB apps).

But you MUST be aware of what they are, and you MUST have a plan in place to handle the continuation of the business if one of them comes true.

Agreed. But also note - this isn't a point of failure. It's an annoyance, and it's Facebook being arbitrary and inconsistent. But it doesn't affect my ability to deliver the product. It just makes it a little harder, because the most logical communication medium between myself and my users has been taken away.

Of all the companies out there, Facebook is the least arbitrary and inconsistent I know! Just imagine they're a perfectly rational, self-interested actor who plays realpolitik all the time and plan accordingly.

For example, how does FB benefit from your product? Does it hamper them in any way? Even the name (Social "Fixer") does not align with FB's interests.

The rational thing to do would be to shut you down. If you had leverage or tied into a broader strategy they might not. But you don't, so they did.

Agreed. Unfortunately, this is a personal side project. If it were my business, I would certainly approach it differently. The only benefit they get is that lots of people continue using Facebook who otherwise may have given up on it. Oh, and they sometimes seem to add features that I come up with first. But in general, yes - I am someone they would like to just make go away.

Which is fine - they have a right to do that. But everyone should be aware of this, because at some point when Facebook decides they don't like your politics, or hobby, or sexual choices, they'll arbitrarily shut you down, too. So, don't give them any more than you can afford to lose. But I see many companies investing a ton of time and money into their Facebook strategy. My point is to beware, because it may not be a good choice.

The main aspect of your product they didn't like us that you were inserting yourself between Facebook and their users. Any platform provider would try to stop that because that relationship is the foundation for every platform's value.

The only possible chance you have around this is growing so fast and becoming so essential that the platform provider can't punish you without punishing themselves. See, e.g., Facebook and Zynga.

the most logical communication medium between myself and my users has been taken away.

Were you paying Facebook to provide your business [edit: I see from another post of yours that it's actually a side project--so this might not be strictly applicable to you, but I still think it's worth bringing up] with a communication medium between you and your users? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the answer is no.

And that brings up what I see as the real issue here; actually two of them:

(1) Business owners still seem to see Facebook as a free platform that they can build on as they please, without realizing that you get what you pay for. If you're not paying Facebook, you're not their customer and your business has no leverage over them, particularly if your business is built on something they're known to dislike.

(2) Why doesn't Facebook allow businesses to pay for some kind of premium business account that lets them communicate with their users, or even alter the user interface their users see? That would solve both problems--your problem of needing a communication platform that everybody knows about, and FB's problem of not getting any benefit from third parties piggybacking off their popularity.

I agree with this, and (1) is kind of the warning I was trying to spread to other business owners, for whom this is NOT just a side project. I can get around this. Other people and businesses seem to be going "all in" on Facebook, without realizing what a huge risk they are taking. I understood and understand the risk. That's part of the game I'm playing with them, but I also have the right to call them out when I don't like it, and to bring attention to this problem that others might have at some point.

>You run on AWS in a single availability zone,

How about: Your hosting relies totally on amazon?

This is called "bus factor".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Well, for the second bullet it is.

I'm sure there's a bus large enough to take out all of AWS, but then again, AWS being down would be the least of our worries.

It comes down to this: if you are serious about your business, build redundancy throughout ALL layers, not just technology but also personnel. You gave the example of CTO, but I would go one step further: there should always be someone who can act as interim CEO if something happens to you.

If you're building a startup might this be too expensive to implement?

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