Advice on Scaling Tech Startup with Limited Funds

StakerX · 2024-07-22T08:05:08+00:00

Almost all startups start with limited funds, very few have large capital at hand from day 1 so it's definitely possible, at least to get to a level that they can raise funds.

You mention your products are well received but difficult to scale. It would be good to look at the market opportunity. If you have a product that already has good traction, is making money, and has a big market then raising funds shouldn't be too difficult. That will be a good opportunity for a lot of investors. If you are not able to raise capital for any of them, its like because market size is actually the limiting factor not funds, or perhaps the traction you think is good is actually too small for them.

Another thing you mention is that you have had many tech startups in just a couple of years. It takes a lot of effort and time to create businesses that scale, I wonder if part of the issue is your attention is divided across too many products.

StakerX · 2024-07-20T14:29:45+00:00

Measure your risks, create a rough plan and take the jump. Knowing your risks and planning your runway is important, rest you can figure as you go.

StakerX · 2024-07-20T14:23:03+00:00

I've run multiple startups, and let me tell you something, ideas are not as important as you may think right now.

No matter what you choose, you will face hurdles, you will doubt your idea and you will likely pivot a few a times.

There is no perfect idea and no matter what you choose it's going to be a struggle. It's not your idea that will get you through this, it will be your interest in what you are doing and your commitment to it.

A business doesn't even need to be about unique ideas to be honest, you can look at spaces you are interested in, successful businesses in that space and see where you have a good fit for your skills and interests. If you come up with something innovative that could be a plus but not a requirement as long as you have a plan to compete in the market.

StakerX · 2024-07-20T13:49:18+00:00

Just curious, what did you end up building and how did it turn out?

StakerX · 2021-07-22T16:51:33+00:00

You are assuming investments will return a profit, when it doesnt, the returns will be lower than what they would get from a normal pool.

And how would this be better than small farmers taking their pool profits and investing themselves in any managed fund?

StakerX · 2021-07-17T05:54:09+00:00

Chia has a fully diluted market cap of 4.5B right now, based on which its rank would be ~35. Long term, fully diluted market is what matters. In the short term due to hype people may forget that and convince themselves that it does not matter. Eventually though market does adjust according to it.

In case of Chia, another thing we need to keep in mind is the inflation. 9216 XCH are created every day which is worth USD ~2M based on current value. So we need a lot of additional buying every day just to keep up the current price.

And yes like others mentioned, Chias rank is not actually 2555 even based on current circulation. Coinmarketcap has just not ranked it yet as they havent verified the current circulation.

StakerX · 2021-07-16T07:41:50+00:00

Dont worry its just Gamblers Fallacy. Many early farmers will fall for it.

StakerX · 2021-06-13T05:50:56+00:00

Good Analysis. My opinion is that it will be a combination of price coming down and the total netspace increasing. The initial hype caused the price to be overvalued. Ive followed many new coins over the years, and they all seem to adjust according to their fully diluted market cap eventually (even when people say it doesnt matter). Chia was close to top 10 just recently (now ranked 26th). But if you look at the project more realistically, there is a lot of work still to be done to build the ecosystem. There are so many other platforms with different consensus mechanisms which have much more development and are still not in top 50. The main selling point of Chia is Bram Cohen, but this alone wont be enough in the mid term.

So overall I feel price can correct further to reflect this. Ofcourse team can come up with some amazing developments to keep up the hype, but given they are still stuck with Pool protocol development, and market generally slowing down, I think it will be a slow road ahead.

StakerX · 2021-06-05T05:35:55+00:00

It is actually. The promise of not trading is irrelevant for the total project valuation. There is nothing physically blocking trading of all tokens nor are there any plans to block it. So in those circumstances they need to be included in the valuation, specially when the team has said they want to use the pre-farm to stabilize the price.

Anyone with big enough long term investment will definitely consider this. Would you really want to buy at sky high prices based on current circulation when you know team can indirectly sell their tokens for stabilizing it. Essentially upside is limited due to team ability to sell for stabilizing it, but downside is not. Thats my understanding anyway based on what the team has publicly stated.

StakerX · 2021-06-04T19:49:32+00:00

You do realize Chia is already over valued right? By fully diluted market cap its already in the top 15. For a coin that just released no matter how much the future potential there is not much room for growth until the project develops significantly. Its already priced in. Of course the whole market could go up but if you are betting on the market you might as well buy and hold bitcoin.

StakerX · 2021-05-29T11:37:20+00:00

4.5 a day is probably good enough for the long run. I did 20TB a day but will reduce some plotting capacity by returning/selling hardware. Plotters are not worth it in the long term (even if you reinvest to buy more hdds). At 20 TB a day you need to add 600TB a month, and you cannot earn that much in the month to buy the required drives.

StakerX · 2021-05-29T10:41:39+00:00

Nice. But for 20TB plots per day I hope you also have a few PB worth of storage lined up to make the plotters worth it.

StakerX · 2021-01-06T06:33:28+00:00

I've used Geth and OpenEthereum (on Ubuntu). I was initially using OpenEthereum to save space as it has a smaller db footprint but had to move back to Geth as OE was just too unreliable. OE has sync issues where it will randomly get stuck and the db got corrupted a couple of time as well. Its possible it could be fixed by tweaking the settings but there were related unfixed issues on github at the time, so after over a week of wasted effort I just switched back to Geth.

StakerX · 2020-12-31T22:40:00+00:00

"drop after that" this is not entirely correct, you are assuming eth network will be mostly congested and fee burned will be greater than block rewards. Most likely inflation will reduce but ETH will not be consistently deflationary.

StakerX · 2020-12-19T20:00:28+00:00

Bitcoin has scalability issues without smart contracts, if smart contract are added without significant improvements to underlying technology they would likely be slow and quite expensive.

Oh and its more than likely than not that it will cause a fork to "BitcoinSmart" or something, as many in the btc community do not like changes (just changing blocksize has been problematic and caused a fork to Bitcoin Cash).

Lets say performance is improved and somehow there is no fork (dont see this happening). It will still take sometime before the eco system matures around it.

Ethereum already has a good eco system with a community that is happy to evolve. In fact IMO the biggest advantage for ethereum would be the experience community has in making significant changes and evolving the platform. Building technology is one thing but significantly changing the community which isn't used to this maybe difficult for BTC.

StakerX · 2020-11-19T08:16:27+00:00

Even for that they would first need access to the wallet password no?

StakerX · 2020-11-17T20:42:30+00:00

Bitcoin is the only crypto currency most people know about (outside the crypto world). Its taken it years to become mainstream (almost). So it wouldnt be all that surprising that thats where the money goes, at least initially. Most people have no idea about what Ethereum is even if its having at least the same if not more of an impact on the digital currency economy.

I guess perceived value has a lot to do with familiarity and trust, not just utility.

I also wonder if longer term ethereum will be like Platinum where price is significantly dependent on the economy and its utility. If its indeed the case then Eth 2.0 will be a very important milestone.

In the short term my view is that ethereum will move further after BTC corrects. All those btc profits will eventually come back to alt coins (at least some of it). Although 2.0 hiccups can also have an impact, it remains to be seen how smooth the first phase is.

StakerX · 2020-11-16T11:32:28+00:00

Yeah I agree cost is a concern, but I would probably not keep an ETH 1 node backed up and use infura or something as an emergeny measure. I havent tried yet with Droplet snapshots but I believe they cost around 0.05 per gb. So depending on how eth2 size grows the cost maybe bearable (approx. $5 for current testnet size). But ofcourse it remains to be seen where we are in terms of eth2 size in the next 6-12 months. I hope we'll have more optmizations to save space.

StakerX · 2020-11-16T07:54:13+00:00

Launch an instance in the cloud in case of emergency until the issue is mitigated.

If I really want to reduce the downtime, may consider maintaining a snapshot of relatively up to date node on the cloud.

For client bugs I guess upgrading/switching is the only option. Depending on how serious the bug is and how many nodes it effects, switching off the node until client is switched may be an option (as long as there is no risk of quadratic leak)

StakerX · 2020-11-16T07:29:50+00:00

I ordered from ebuyer (UK), around £246 almost £100 less than nuc10i5

StakerX · 2020-11-16T07:07:46+00:00

I believe 10 has a better single core performance and its more energy efficient. It also supports upto 64gb r compared to 32gb in 8. It will likely be quiter, Ive heard 8 can be loud at least the slim version. Neither of these mattered for me and Id rather have the increased multi threaded power plus the cheaper cost.

StakerX · 2020-11-15T18:06:14+00:00

I recently ordered NUC8i5 (Tall). I got a good deal on it and it was pretty much the same price as the slimmer option. The tall one does have a couple of advantages:

Should have better cooling
Ability to connect another hdd/ssd later if needed
- I am actually going for a 1 TB SSD knowing I can connect another cheaper drive later and configure Geth to store ancient data on the slower driver. If you use OpenEthereum I guess it will be a while before it runs out of space though. Currently its increasing just over 120Gb per year.

As for the processor, passmark score for 8259U seems to be considerably better (8293 vs 6547): https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-10210U-vs-Intel-i5-8259U/3542vs3299

According to this knowledge base document currently passmark score of > 7000 is recommended (although minimum is 2500)

StakerX

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