I’m that guy whom the post is talking about. I decided against weighing in on the original thread on HN because I was still dealing with the downfall. A couple of things that I noticed:

  • Our users were very understanding of what happened. We have received nothing but encouragement to keep on working.

  • Some comments on HN were nasty. I’m glad to be 33 and not 23. Otherwise, I could have been driven away from building my product because of my own incompetence.

  • Many commented on devs vs ops. The way I see it, I can ask a dev to supervise the work of an ops contractor. I can’t hire ops + dev at this stage.

Any start-up has three main constraints: time, money and talent. These are not set in stone, you can use time to produce money (consulting), you can use money to buy talent (hiring), and you can even convert time in talent (training).

So, when people say “let professionals handle it”. Well, no, my particular set of constraints won’t allow me to do this. My budget for this is around $100/mo. In an event where I completely run out of money I’d have to take down the site indefinitely, which causes the same effect as an HD loss.

It is clear now that I lack enough resources to run a complex app reliably. My focus in the next months is procuring those resources (money) so I can put it back into the product (ops and devs).