I have come to a conclusion after pandering with many different thoughts and ideas that making more money than you spend is the only way to do good business and a majority of us will benefit a lot with this thought process.
I also feel that this is an ideology and it reflects in the different decisions you take in your business, both big and small.
About six years ago when I was building a side project, which didn’t go anywhere by the way, I got into startup school from YC because they were offering $5000 in AWS credits valid for 2 years. I built and deployed my project on AWS and I never really launched. I just kept building and building thinking that hey I still got 1.5 years of runway and then I still got 1 more year. And before I knew 2 years just passed by and boy is AWS expensive.
I shut down my project.
This time, I am building, but I am
- Not deploying on AWS, using Hetzner instead and pay $25 a month right from day 1
- Building for myself, so I am not looking for any one to signup to build an initial version
- Building only features that help me immediately
- Building to launch
This is helping me with knowing exactly what my spend is going to be and how much I need to be making to take a profit. On AWS, it’s impossible to know what they charge and how much they charge.
The choices are forcing me to think of unit economics and not just building amazing features which we engineers are always interested in doing. I now have a fair idea of how much existing products in the same domain are charging and what I can charge based on my expenses.
It remains to be seen where this ideology takes me, but I am excited to see what the future holds.
