Startups, Saas & Financing and API/Hosting-costs
Hi everyone.
I imagine several of you have thought about creating some side project that is more than a proof of concept. But in the event that the project would take off and acquire lots of users, you would need to consider scaling the infrastructure to support lots of traffic/users. And if your solution relies on calling third party API’s that cost money or doing heavy GPU-needing stuff, you would need to take that into account in deciding how you finance / take revenue for your service. Unless you go with a “make some losses and see what happens” approach 
.
If your solution is compute heavy per session, you would need to spin up parallell instances of your solution.
I would like to start a discussion about profitability and feasibility of side projects. What are your thoughts, what are the risks, what are the opportunities, what tools do you recommend, say for
- frontend hosting
- compute/api server
- model storing
- fine-tuning based on new data during coming in from users
- payment system
- subscription models
I’ve been in your shoes and ended up getting real value from a pitch deck agency that helped me turn messy notes into a clear investor story. They focused a lot on sharpening the narrative, not just making slides pretty, which made my meetings go smoother. If you’re juggling strategy and design on your own, leaning on a team like that can save a ton of time and stress.
