Counting beans and getting hit by a bus

Tue 19 Feb 2019, 17:2019 Feb 2019

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This week, Jon and Justin are wrestling with some heavy startup founder topics:

What should your SaaS company's gross margins be?
How much is bandwidth going to cost us? How does it affect our margins?
Example: [Account A] does 495,000 downloads in a month, average file size is 8 MB, that’s 3960 GB of bandwidth in a month. If bandwidth is $0.01 per GB, that’s $39.60 just for bandwidth for that one account. And that’s if we can get it that cheap. Otherwise, we’d pay $198 on AWS, or Azure. If we used Google Cloud it’d be $316.
The burden of keeping our service up rests on Jon's shoulders. How can we reduce the risk?
How can we increase platform resiliency, automation, and improve our internal customer service tools?

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Show notes:

LeadEdge Capital: “Gross margins for SaaS typically range from 60% to more than 80%."
Quora on SaaS gross margins.
Most users don't realize how much bandwidth costs (Twitter)
An explanation of bandwidth
Is 1 GB equal to 1024 MB or 1000 MB?
Z-cast closes up shop
We're talking to someone at Cloudflare (tweet)
Jamie's blog: Implementing Impersonation

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