Bootstrapping Architecture for Startups
Written by Shreya Pattar
Bootstrapping a business is one of the most effective ways to start your own venture. A bootstrapped venture belongs to you, and this sole ownership makes you the master decision maker, which is a huge benefit. Of course, bootstrapping comes with its own price, and this price comes solely out of your pocket. Due to such limited resources, setting up a bootstrapping architecture can be a big challenge for any startup.
Yes, startups do face difficulty in bootstrapping. But, there is one specific architecture that you can significantly reduce much of your initial costs in: digital architecture. Just by making the right decision of using various open-source technologies, you can save a lot of money.
This article will guide you towards the solution of a challenge faced by almost every startup such that you can support up to 100k users by a free tier AWS account. Interesting isn’t it? Let’s get started!
What challenges do startups face?
In a business, all you want to do is make things simple and do less work: that’s how you can focus on the big things and grow fast. Currently, various infrastructure services available for startups, such as, strong databases, networking, management, security, governance, and analytics. These digital services are available over AWS and GCP, and help you reduce the complexity of handling the digital platforms yourself.
Although these services save time and effort, they do add up serious costs to the company, which makes it difficult for startups access these services. Getting access to many of the above-mentioned services provided by these cloud computing platforms can be very important for kickstarting the development of a startup. There is an efficient solution available but it requires the use of right infrastructure models and the presence of adequate resources. Again, getting access to unwanted resources can increase costs and it must be eliminated.
For cash-starved startups, it is really important to break this barrier so that they can focus on the other aspects of building their business.
Is there an affordable solution available for startups?
You can significantly cut down the costs of bootstrapping architecture if you proceed with innovative products and services which are focused on achieving the aims of your startup.
Your products can be brought to the realm of viability by taking a step towards following the right architecture. You must consider using open-source technologies and avoiding software that requires heavy investments.
How does this solution work?
You can easily reduce costs by following an architecture that mainly runs on two key components:
Redis:
Redis is an in-memory key-value database. Redis is one of the most popular and fastest key-value databases, which is also an open-source software. Since it is written in C, it is known to be highly efficient too. It supports different abstract data structures, and various programming languages are known to have the client-side Redis language bindings. Redis is available on Amazon Web Services and Redis cache is being offered in Azure by Microsoft.Node.js:
Node.js is known to be best for startups as it requires minimum hand-offs. Node.js is a cross-platform, JavaScript runtime server. It is an open-source platform that can execute JavaScript outside of a browser. Node.js can be used to handle a variety of workloads and it is fast, efficient, extensible and most importantly, widely popular among developers. Node.js is built such that a trained developer can carry out both front-end and back-end services without compromising the developer’s efficiency. Moreover, the code quality is too good and can be easily understood by developers working on the same project. In the case of Node.js, developers require fewer resources, making the process easier.What does all this mean for a startup?
Such a bootstrapped architecture can support up to 100k users with a free tier AWS account. This is amazing for startups as it nils down the cost of development for growing startups and helps them save a large amount of money from being spent for nothing better. By applying this strategy, startups can support 100k users at no effective cost. This compatibility at such a large scale can help startups hire talented developers for making all of this possible in the best way. Moreover, it helps in the production of better services at much lower prices and reduces investment costs heavily. What more does a growing startup need than reduced expenses?