An Experienced Infrastructure Provider Can Help Startups Scale Sustainably

Tens of thousands of startups are founded each year, but only a tiny fraction become sustainable businesses, let alone unicorns. Many have no business model or market fit, and even those that do are more likely to fail than succeed. But when success does arrive, it makes the risk worthwhile. The intelligent management of risk is essential to achieving that success: smart entrepreneurs learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before and attempt to make better decisions. I’d like to focus on a major source of suboptimal decisions that causes problems for otherwise healthy startups: infrastructure scaling.

Startups often fail because of an inability to sustainably scale infrastructure. Scaling is hard and many entrepreneurs don’t realize how complex it can be to build and manage large infrastructure platforms. Of course, modern cloud environments provide an almost infinite amount of compute and storage. Throwing money at the problem is one way to solve it, which is why I have stressed the concept of sustainability.

Even the best financed startup doesn’t have infinite resources to invest in infrastructure, but with forward planning and an infrastructure provider with the expertise to guide founders towards the right solution, it’s possible to build sustainable cloud and bare metal infrastructure platforms that can support growing businesses without exhausting the good-will of their investors.

Sustainable infrastructure scaling is jeopardized by three factors: a lack of planning, spiraling infrastructure costs, and insufficient technical expertise. Typically, at least one founder has technical expertise, but being a superstar developer doesn’t mean you have the skills of a site reliability engineer or a scaling expert.

VCs tell new startups not to worry about scaling and to focus on getting their MVP up-and-running. That’s sound advice: the most meticulous reliability and scaling plans won’t count for much if the product never makes it to market. But there’s really no need to choose between product focus and sound infrastructure planning: just choose an infrastructure vendor who can guide you in the right direction and take on some of the infrastructure management load.

Most cloud vendors won’t help out here: redundancy, scaling, and availability are left up to the cloud user. Public cloud platforms will happily consume your runway as you deploy ever more infrastructure until the bills become unsustainable: EverPix is a classic example. Steadfast is different: our team has spent the last decade building scalable infrastructure platforms with a mixture of different infrastructure modalities, including public and private clouds, and bare metal. We’re happy to work with our clients to build an efficient and sustainably scalable infrastructure solution.

Startups are fragile and founder and employee efforts should be focused on creating business value, not on building and managing infrastructure. It takes every shred of energy founders have to bring their product vision to life. Infrastructure is necessary, but just as great painters no longer mix their own paints from minerals and oil, entrepreneurs should not spend their time building and managing servers and network architectures. Their time is better spent building great products.