[itsnotlupus]

Common startup wisdom is that having to deal with too many users is a "good problem" to have, along with notions of launching fast first and solving scale later.

But of course sustained rapid user growth without a robust preexisting scalability approach means you're caught with your pants down, and it's a struggle to put them back up, at least until new user traffic starts to die down.

[dboreham]

Another version of this is : investors don't want to pay for scalability if the business never takes off.

Considering that only perhaps 10% of businesses take off, this isn't a bad approach but it does mean doing some catch-up in the event of success.

It can also be hard to predict exactly where scaling challenges will lie without having the scale traffic to inform you. That is, much time and effort can be expended solving non-problems that never appear.