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by astrofinch 5795 days ago
Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale?

Development speed is way more important than scalability. Like Paul Graham says, the vast majority of startups fail because they make a product no one wants or because they never launch a product in the first place. Faster software development means you figure out if your product is a dud faster, and you're less likely to run out of morale before you've got something substantial.

I've been working on my current (unreleased) project with Django and jQuery on Linux for about a month. Here's all of the stuff I've made use of from the Django, jQuery, and Python communities:

http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/

http://south.aeracode.org/

http://github.com/dcramer/django-ratings

http://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form

http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar

http://github.com/alex/django-ajax-validation

http://fabfile.org/

http://orkans-tmp.22web.net/star_rating/

http://jquery.malsup.com/form/

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/ScrollTo

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/

There's no way I could ever use a niche framework after having drunk this reusable code kool-aid.

Even if Django weren't scalable, if I really was on the road to being the next Facebook or Youtube, there'd be plenty of time and money to rewrite in something that could scale.

2 comments

Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale?

yeah - friendster.

Friendster is actually in decent shape today. So inability to scale didn't kill them--it just dealt them a very substantial blow.

Twitter would be an example of a startup that experienced severe scaling issues and still ended up on top.

Know any others?

I remember the early days when you couldn't log in to Friendster for hours because the servers were overloaded!
Did they attribute their performance problems to tech stack or architecture? Or did they ever say?
I wonder, could the following be true: any startup that faces the problem of unscalable implementation will by then have the necessary resources to resolve the scaling problem? Because, by the time you run into scalability problems, you'll probably have enough investor|customer money to invest in re-architecturing your code?
That implies that startups charge money for their product/service. More often than not, sites that need to scale for millions of users are "free to use".
He also mentioned investor money. Investors tend to invest in sites that have tons of users even if the site is unprofitable at the time of investment (see youtube, digg, facebook).