
An Open Letter To Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) - kunle
http://www.messagefortony.com
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dangrossman
Is HipMob funded? How do bootstrapped startups handle huge companies like
Zappos? Would they be able to take on a client whose resource usage (in terms
of hardware and people) would outstrip all the startup's current clients by a
few orders of magnitude?

What if they find their architecture doesn't scale and they really can't
handle it -- is it worth the risk of going under because you spent all your
savings on servers and employees to handle this company-changing client, only
to lose them immediately when things don't work out right away?

I guess that's why startups seek funding, eh? I'm not sure what I'd do if a
Zappos wanted to sign up with one of my apps, honestly. Spend the money
scaling up quickly for them, not knowing with certainty that I'd be able to
keep ahead of their usage, or just turn them down?

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kunle
Hi there - Ayo from Hipmob here. You raise a fair question - we believe we can
handle the scale challenge well (we're built on Heroku & AWS), and we've
deployed with that in mind. That being said, only time (and deployments) will
tell.

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javajosh
That is wrong. You should be eminently prepared for this question. At the very
least, you should have estimated the scale you need to be able to support, and
demonstrate that your systems can handle the load. This means spending
development time and effort to create a scaling test environment, with
instrumentation, and then spending time to present the results.

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kunle
Didn't mean to sound dismissive. My reply wasn't stating that we're
unprepared; we're absolutely prepared and we think about this ALL DAY. We're
also seasoned enough to know that behaviors sometimes deviate from test
environments while in the wild.

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jordanthoms
Cool approach - but my nitpick is the misquoting of Fry -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfSzgV1q5g>

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Ataub24
Good luck. Definitely a creative attempt to land a client :)

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modarts
Well played. Definitely a move to boost traffic to hipmob rather than a
legitimate open letter to Tony, but I like the creative thinking behind the
campaign.

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hamxiaoz
Nice try! Although the iphone picture on your website is not clear/sharp. Do
you need a photographer to take a better pic for you?

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kunle
Hit me ayo[at]hipmob.com!!

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stfu
Not sure if I just jumped into an employee upvoting scheme, but its a nice
idea. Good luck!

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kunle
Haha thanks. We dont (yet) have enough employees to have a scheme, but good
idea. It's coming.

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hoodwink
I'm excited to see if he responds

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kunle
Haha thanks, we are too :)

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xxpor
I don't know if Zappos' CS infrastructure is the same as Amazon's, but if it
is I will just say I feel getting this to integrate would be.... non-trivial.

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kunle
CS infrastructure is quite a bit different from Zappos (Amazon doesn't provide
live chat support for example from what I understand), and as entities, both
their customer service philosophies (while focused on keeping the customer
happy) are quite a bit different - Zappos is very high-touch, and Amazon is
not.

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rhizome
Where's the printer friendly version? I'm not playing too-clever scrolling
games.

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ameyamk
great marketing!

