
How HotelTonight Scaled Their Stack [audio] - relivo
http://stackshare.io/posts/how-hoteltonight-scaled-their-stack-from-mvp-to-ipo
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rokhayakebe
Curious, What are all these companies building that makes scale an issue? I
see only CRUD products. At what point does scale become an issue? 1000
concurrent users, 10,000, 100,000?

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whatnotests
State? Keeping a single source of truth which changes every 1/100th second
while millions of users are doing something to change that state?

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toomuchtodo
Right, but companies like Sabre [1] solved this in the 60s. If its gotten
progressively easier over ~55 years, why should we be wowed now that anyone
can spin up a travel aggregator that scales (just as I'm not impressed that
Simple/BankSimple exists when they ride on top of a real bank, Bancorp; I'm
actually deeply disappointed as one of the first Simple customers that ended
up leaving because it took _5 years_ for them to implement joint checking
accounts. At a bank). Amazon, airlines, Ticketmaster, all online companies
that have to maintain "truth" about shared inventory and its pricing up to the
second.

If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly
revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and
Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply
talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.

Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of
a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using
Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc,
I _do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business_.
Grinding away on a business day after day for years is _fucking hard_. I'd
just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation)

Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.

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cloudjacker
> I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground

Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business

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toomuchtodo
My reply was directed at the comment I replied to that maintaining state at
the level and complexity described is a solved problem. Sorry I wasn't less
ambiguous.

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hellofunk
Sometimes when I read articles like this, I wonder if I have stumbled into an
alternate universe. I am always having to google every Nth term that pops up,
and the terms are indeed surreal. I think everything is going fine until I see
"Varnish".

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aepearson
You are definitely not alone in that feeling...

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xfour
Has anyone used HotelTonight in the last two years? Curious as I thought they
were leaps ahead with their app early in the iOS native development cycle but
I've heard crickets about them since

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manacit
I've happily used it a few times this year - I almost always check their
prices against bigger sites like hotels.com and they can usually provide a
lower price if I'm booking after 6PM (before then and it's often the same
price you can find directly from the hotel). More importantly, I very much
value their curated set of "advice" about the hotel, and find it significantly
easier to filter than sites like booking.com or otherwise.

Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to
wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something
across before I was able to get my room.

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davidu
This is a frustratingly misleading title. They haven't had an IPO yet and it's
unclear if they ever will.

One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare
for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude
(or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and
the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.

