I agree, but I also classify some of these as "learn them once and you're all set".
Maybe it takes you a month the first time around and a week the 10th time around. First product suffers, the other products not so much. Now it just takes a week of your time and does not require you to pay large AWS fees, which means you are not bleeding money
I like to set up scrappy products that do not rack up large monthly fees. This means I can let them run unprofitable for longer and I don't have to seek an investor early, which would light up a large fire under everyone's butts and start influencing timelines because now they have the money and want a return asap.
I'll launch a week later - no biggie usually. I could have come up with the idea a month later, so I'm still 3 weeks early ;)
It doesn't work for all projects, obviously, but I've seen plenty of SaaS start out with a shopping spree, then pay monthly fees and purchase licenses for stuff that they could have set up for free if they put some (usually not a lot) effort into it. When times get rough, the shorter runway becomes a hard fact of life. Maybe they wouldn't have needed a VC and could have bootstrapped and also survived for longer.
Learning it all is what gave me an appreciation for RDS! I’ve self managed a number of Postgres and MySQL databases, including a 10TB Postgres cluster with all of the HA and backup niceties.
While I generally agree as far as initial setup time goes, I favor RDS because I can forget about it, whereas the hand rolled version demands ongoing maintenance, and incurs a nonzero chance of simple mistakes that, if made, could result in a 100% dataloss unrecoverable scenario.
I’m also mostly talking about typical, funded startups here, as opposed to indie/solo devs. If you’re flying solo launching a tiny proof of concept that may only ever have a few users, by all means run it yourself if you’d like, but if you’ve raised money to grow faster and are paying employees to iterate rapidly searching for PMF…just pay for RDS and make sure as much time as possible is spent on product features that provide actual business value. It starts at like $15/month. The cost of simply not being laser-focused on product is far greater.
Maybe it takes you a month the first time around and a week the 10th time around. First product suffers, the other products not so much. Now it just takes a week of your time and does not require you to pay large AWS fees, which means you are not bleeding money
I like to set up scrappy products that do not rack up large monthly fees. This means I can let them run unprofitable for longer and I don't have to seek an investor early, which would light up a large fire under everyone's butts and start influencing timelines because now they have the money and want a return asap.
I'll launch a week later - no biggie usually. I could have come up with the idea a month later, so I'm still 3 weeks early ;)
It doesn't work for all projects, obviously, but I've seen plenty of SaaS start out with a shopping spree, then pay monthly fees and purchase licenses for stuff that they could have set up for free if they put some (usually not a lot) effort into it. When times get rough, the shorter runway becomes a hard fact of life. Maybe they wouldn't have needed a VC and could have bootstrapped and also survived for longer.