redguava

I don't understand how you can be in it for the long run if you've taken funding. That means you need to be working towards some sort of exit. VC isn't just there to make your business awesome, they want their money back (in multiples of course).

I understand the benefits to VC and congrats on raising it, I just don't see how you can be in it for the long run. How is that possible?

I was able to get active customers immediately (not many, but a few). This was due to the work I did pre-launch to gather interest.

I also had a private beta before launch and the beta users converted across.

I don't think this question is really going to help you though, as it varies for everyone and is not an indicator of how well you're going to do. You're probably best wondering/asking how do you get more customers. That's what is relevant now. Not how you compare to other unrelated businesses in different industries.

Great advice.

I always fall for the trap of expecting the last 20% to take 20% of the time. Not sure why I don't learn my lesson.

It turns out that understanding how to make a website handle an influx of visitors is also important.

I believe the larger dynos are mostly to better handle using Unicorn as the webserver. Unicorn allows multiple workers to run per dyno, and has it's own smart routing, so it compensates well for Heroku's routing system. The downside to Unicorn was that the workers share a dyno's memory and often you couldn't have more than 2 per dyno with 512mb memory. This change helps that a lot.

I am not sure if it's everywhere in the world, but in Australia a "Doodle" can often be slang for a penis. With this in mind, I am not sure DoodleCam is a great name unless that's what you were going for.

I was kind of expecting your service to be like chatroulette which also could have been called DoodleCam.

It sounds like a perception thing. If the book was $79, or you could buy the book and the spreadsheet for $119... would you still have a problem?

Evaluate it on it's own merits.

Whilst not controversial, I think a point that needs to be made. A lot of people have their sole focus/goal on raising money. They then raise money and their next sole focus/goal is raising more money.

I think more people need to realise it's an option and a choice, not a required stepping stone.

There's a lot a people around, I wouldn't settle for anyone that doesn't meet both criteria.

10% week over week is very different to 10% on your biggest week ever.

I wouldn't rule out remote work. You just need a business/team that works together and values learning.

Think of it like this, if a food restaurant has a vegetarian burger on the menu. After a while they find that as they grow they can't keep producing the burger that way anymore. So they decide to use a beef product in the burger, but they don't tell anyone. They just keep selling it as a vegetarian burger. Do you think that is blatantly lying? I don't see a lot of difference here.

This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There are other places the same.

This is only part of the whole story as well.

They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked.

This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue).

When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims.

For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.

I'd look for companies that are not funded in that case.

I wish I could vote this up many more times. It's exactly what I want to find out about.

Thanks! Always wondered about that.

@bitcartel (not sure why I couldn't reply to your comment)... I believe from my discussions with Heroku that the "random selection algorithm" is also not true.

"Dude, this is a service used by developers and devops. You aren't meant to trust what they say." that is ridiculous. I use their service and I have trusted what they have said. They are the experts on their own service, why shouldn't I?

Also, the reason I chose Heroku is because DevOps is not my area of expertise, if I wanted to measure and analysis the inner workings I would have hosted elsewhere. Heroku is meant to alleviate that pain for me, I pay them excess over what I would pay elsewhere for that luxury.

As for the website not lying, yes it does. Go to "how it works" and click on routing. It's plain not true. Is it too much to ask that they update this in the last 3 years since the change?

I think the response is purely PR. Actually give something that will help their existing customers with this problem.

In answer to "who cares if the explanation comes today or tomorrow", I care if the explanation comes today or tomorrow. I use Heroku and have hit scaling issues in the last few weeks very similar to this. More information on what is going on behind the scenes will help me immediately.

As for discrepancy in documentation, this is one of the most major parts of their infrastructure and directly relates to how well applications scale. To claim they have intelligent routing and then not having so, that is completely misleading and not just a minor documentation discrepancy. This isn't a tech document that got out of date, this is straight from their main "how it works" page... http://www.heroku.com/how/scale. Read the bit on routing.

I don't understand why people think this is a great response. They know how their routing works, just say so. It can't be that hard to give a basic overview of it before they release a more comprehensive post.

As for the comment "Improving our documentation and website to accurately reflect our product". That is a very round about way of saying "our website indicates our service does things that it does not" which is a VERY bad thing. People are paying for this service based on what Heroku claims it does.

If the website has been inaccurate for years, that is false advertising and really a bigger problem than they are giving credit to.

If anything, I am more disappointed now that I have read this response, it has not appeased anything.

You realise that's an opinion piece written by one person right? PG has a very specific angle on the start-up world.

It sounds like your process isn't handling them well, or you just aren't making them a real part of your team.

At my company, we have half our staff in Melbourne, Australia... and half spread out globally around many different time zones.

The remote workers are every bit a part of the team as the Melbourne workers.

I think adopting a more asynchronous workflow makes sense, both to include remote workers but also it can be very efficient (remove distractions).

A tool like Campfire to handle communication is really important too, anyone can log in and see what they missed and you don't need to be there at the same time to have a conversation.

Also, you need to trust them and give a lot of autonomy, it can't be managed in a traditional way.

I don't get why context relevant ads are bad. If I am going to see ads, I would rather they be ads that might be useful.

As long as they aren't releasing my mail for all to see, and it's an automated thing... so what.

Thanks.

I think so.

I agree they should be transparent about how it works, no argument there.

I think it's much fairer that you can choose what you pay for. If you don't want it to idle, pay $35 and get a dyno. I wouldn't want to have to pay $100+ (or some other amount) before it stops idling.

They have an "addon" called a dyno for $35 p/month that stops the idling. He didn't choose that one.

He has purchased other addons and is complaining he isn't getting the benefit from this one. Of course not.

They are trying to "cheat" the system by setting up automated pings to keep it alive. Do you really think that's in the spirit of the offering from Heroku? I don't know why it isn't working but I hope Heroku just "handles" that scenario.

Like I said, if Heroku did provide the resources for all these free apps (and there must be so many that aren't used) then that would be reflected in their pricing. I pay for Heroku and don't want to be paying more to compensate resources for their free apps.