Like the time with our first startup in YC W06. Our first client was the result of me just cold emailing a CEO of a startup I saw featured in Wired magazine. "Hey I like what you're doing. Maybe we can find something to do together." Short. Not expecting much. No pitch. Just genuine appreciation and interest in brainstorming a collaboration. And it unexpectedly lead to them signing a 5 figure deal with us which was everything to a tiny startup not making anything :)
Over and over in my career I was amazed at what happened when I just bothered showing up.
Good on Stripe and Atlas for making this more available to more bootstrapped companies like the one in this post, but there's certainly a huge difference between $1k or $5k and $100k.
On the one hand I understand why cloud providers have to limit this, they're trying to buy lock-in and have to choose startups that they think have a larger chance of growing big enough for this to be profitable. Even a successful bootstrapped company will normally not grow as large as a successful VC-backed company, and will probably be smarter with their money as well and not rack up enormous AWS bills so quickly.
But on the other hand, this is an almost invisible example of the kind of gatekeeping that helps those who are starting from a position of privilege (i.e. have the connections to raise a large seed round) and gives them a leg up over everyone else. If as a tech community we're striving to make starting a company more meritocratic and make sure there is a low barrier to entry for everyone, I wonder if there's a better way to distribute these kinds of perks?
1) Ask for applications and pay people to mass review applications to pick which startups are more likely to succeed
2) Have 1) be done by proxy for you for free, by only giving it out to startups who a professional "startup success predictor person" has already invested in
They've chosen to go with 2.
This seems very backward, because you also don’t really need those credits anymore at that point.
Scenario
1. You succeed, your startup is now worth something ( big or small ), you will be dealing with scaling issues, people issues, marketing issues, profits issues or gazillion of other small things, the last thing you want is switching your infrastructure provide.
2. You failed, or burn through those cash, but not to worry, since your are backed by incubator or early stage VC, the likely hood of you getting another round of funding is high. And those will be used on AWS anyway.
There are very little downside to AWS but lots of upside.
Google was the first to move that way, now Microsoft has cancelled its Bootstrap program and even Facebook has done away with its Startup Accelerator program in favour of 'Contact your nearest Accelerator/VC we approve of' model.
I was personally benefitted by Facebook's aforementioned Accelerator program. I applied for my previous startup's privacy focused chat-app-network dating platform for their bootstrap phase, but they directly approved it for their Accelerator phase through which I received $80,000 worth benefits incl. $15,000 AWS credits on which I ran my product; these kind of help makes life or death difference for a disabled soloprenuer from a village in India running bootstrapped startup(Facebook doesn't know this).
Now anyone in my position is at the mercy of some Accelerator or VC.
I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.
If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?
Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?
You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.
I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.
I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.
Obviously everything about my Startup was part of my application details, since my application was hosted on Facebook platform(messenger app) it knew the statistics as well and I believe that's the reason it got selected.
Then again, its Facebook we are talking about here, it might even know what I had for breakfast the day I applied.
But I believe you made that comment out of concern of my well-being, I appreciate that and I apologise if my sentence formation caused unnecessary confusion.
P.S. I use my real name here to own accountability of the things I write here and to ensure I don't compromise my integrity in the lure of anonymity/pseudo-anonymity(No offence to anyone who don't use their real name, I understand).
Good lesson for budding founders or indie devs.
Shows you the power of "Just ask". If you don't ask, the answer is always no.
Besides that, I think your product serves a wonderful niche. Had the exact problem of hosting a static site for a customer and actually needed to host a full Python backend eventually to receive form submissions. In the future I'll just use formcake.
If I can't trust that I'll get the benefits promised by a service unless my complaint about not getting the benefits reaches a certain threshold of virality in the community, I have to assume I'm not getting them. I'm glad that they did. Maybe I'll get lucky as they did with "an email" and maybe I won't, but I certainly can't rely on it.
Ultimately it is up to AWS's activate team to approve or deny the credits.
In our experience, we were denied extra credits by the AWS activate team and the perk program we had joined specifically for the credits gave us a full refund.
I don't think anyone is saying to "rely" on free money - but if you have a shot at it then at least send the email.
Source: A previous employer got a notification that our instances had been flagged as mining cryptocurrency, and they wanted to invalidate a low-six-figure amount of credits, and back-bill. Note that no cryptocurrency was actually being mined, and I don't know what heuristic they got caught in (although I have suspicions).
Bitcoin is designed to cost the price of electricity when mining on dedicated ASIC miners.
AWS costs are covering enterprise hardware with extra services, electricity is not one tenth of that, and AWS is using general purpose CPU (maybe GPU instances) which are not one tenth as efficient as ASIC.
