YES! I want to find more stories like this. Where can I find Bootstrappers or seedstrappers who have successfully scaled their companies past a few million in revenue with very small teams?
In a solo-bootstrapped business you don't need a few million (USD or EUR) in revenue to run a successful business and live a really good life. In fact, depending on where you mostly live, much less than a single million might be plenty.
I'm looking for companies that are small by intent, but also looking to scale sustainably and grow beyond the capabilities of a single person. There are a lot of small businesses / solopreneurs / freelancers who work enough to get by or do a few hundred $K as a salary replacement, but aren't looking to build anything bigger. A lot of those companies also go by the wayside when the founder retires, gets hired, or something happens. And there's already a lot of content and sources for those types of solopreneur / single founder freelancers / side hustle type businesses.
I'm looking for the other stories of small teams scaling big. I'm basically separating side-hustles and solopreneurs as freelancers from a more sustainable business. Revenue is a cutoff as a way to differentiate, but doesn't have to be the only one.
For sure however, a team of 5 doing $20M implies something significant is happening at scale versus a solopreneur making what would otherwise be salary-replacement level money. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I love solopreneurship. Just trying to find those other stories, which are much harder to find.
Yeah and a lot of these are small only temporarily. Many of these startups are following the grow-at-all-costs VC philosophy that doesn't optimize for small team size. So I'm trying to find those alternate stories. Much harder to find, so when I see the post like this of OP's, I get excited. Hard to find stories of teams that are small by intent, but looking to scale big.
OP lies about going to Harvard. He thinks he can put it on his linkedin just because he did an 8 hour online course from HarvardX on basics of leadership.
So assuming OP didn't lie about his experiences in start-ups (he 100% did lie), his diagnosis of the issues make no sense.
Unindexed db is just pure incompetence so if this is your problem then you have many more things to worry about, like learning the basics of programming.
Automatic testing is not required in start-ups and often comes at much later stages.
Auth vulnerabilities by themselves would never fail a start-up. Only data leakages caused by them would. So it's a very weird point.
There is rarely such a thing as bad code, all the code written by other people is bad while all the code written by me is either perfect or I have an excuse. It's always like that. Saying you should "improve" your code so that the devs spend less time wrestling with it is an insane statement, beyond basic quality controls. Bad code is almost always code that does something in a way that unexpected new reqs were not accounted for. And you can't expect the unexpected.
Autoscaling servers is hard. It's always better to just get what you need and then some. Within reason of course. And then leave the actual deployment optimization to dev ops engineers that you can hire later.
The post is really nonsensical. If there is one thing you should learn, it's to recognize obvious slop and outright lies.
EDIT: Also OP most likely bought upvotes. Weekend numbers like this make no sense. Especially on such a low quality post. And his linkedin is a trove of obvious lies and misrepresentations, even sneakily claiming he founded a company with 80k customers, while in reality he worked for an already established company with 80k customers as a low level employee, and then wording his claim in such a way where he has plausible deniability.
Yeah you have to be very skeptical of anything on Reddit anymore. It's beyond ripe for shill accounts and shill advertising. My first thought was he's low-key prompting people to DM him and hire him to save their crappy startup.
His account is 4 years old but hardly any comments. Definitely doesn't use reddit regularly.
Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.
Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.
Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
What is your approach to keeping these cameras off the Internet, but still on your local network to ensure they're not backchanneling with your awareness?
All IoT devices on my network go into a VLAN that blocks internet access. Using Unifi, I think it's just a checkbox to turn internet access on/off. I use a virtual nic on my Home Assistant VM that recognizes that vlan and can communicate with all those devices, as well as a separate nic which is hooked up to the main vlan.
In my router admin page, there is something called parental control. I used it to disable internet access for all the cameras. I've also used the DHCP settings to give all the cameras static IPs as well.
Dedicated VLAN. Firewall rule forbids all outgoing connections from camera VLAN, even to other LAN, but allows inbound from designated devices on a privileged VLAN (this way random devices on my network can’t talk to the cameras). Frigate is on a VM that is so designated.
I do DHCP reservations then firewall rules. Not as safe as a VLAN but not aware of any devices assigning themselves random IPs outside the DHCP reservation to circumvent it
Easier than getting VLANs working across switches and APs
This is cool. I wonder, as you were iterating on the design and development, why didn't you start with a very small grid (10x10) to validate or test different options for their practicality and operation before scaling up to the 1000 pixel versions? It might have saved a lot of time and money, but maybe small scale tests aren't sufficient to work out the kinks?
