Don’t Be Afraid To Scale

Crazy as it may sound, for some startups and early stage digital businesses, “scale” can be a four-letter word. Let us explain.

Getting a business off the ground requires a lot. It requires time, effort, energy, determination, elbow grease, and a taste for risk. The beauty of digital products, however, is that getting started often requires very little of one important thing: Money.

Whether you’re an experienced coder that can build anything with open source code or a non-technical entrepreneur that’s diving in with a no-code platform, there are plenty of options for getting started with little or no money. For most digital businesses, your greatest early investment capital is time.

So, you’ve got a great idea. A game-changer. An app or web service that is going to take the world by storm. You choose your toolkit — code frameworks and libraries, no-code tools, plugins, server hosting — and you get to building. A few months (or weeks, if you’re super dedicated or a real pro) later, you’re ready to go live.

Then it hits you: what if this works?

It’s not uncommon for a digital business to hit the market with a great concept but question marks surrounding monetization. Even if you’ve got a highly profitable monetization model, there’s a very good chance that you’ll pivot and that model will have to be reimagined.

Often, in fact, if you’ve built a consumer-facing product, monetization is secondary. Until you reach a critical mass of users, you’ll be lucky to break even.

So what happens between point A — building a userbase — and point B — monetizing that userbase? If you start to grow, but the money isn’t ready to flow quite yet, you can be caught in a dilemma: slow your growth or eat the cost of scaling.

You see, when a digital business begins to approach critical mass, maintaining your server infrastructure can become a full-time job (or multiple full-time jobs!). The bigger you get, the more stress your userbase puts on your servers.

Nothing scares off users like down-time or a slow UI.

In the past, the common perception was that codeless solutions were great for getting an minimum viable product (MVP) to market, but lacked the capability to scale when the time comes. Inevitably, you’d have to migrate over to another service or purchase your own servers.

Backendless is built to change that. Our philosophy is that everyone — from a Fortune 500 company to a solo startup — should have access to infinite scalability, at an affordable price.

With Backendless, a no-code/low-code app development platform, infinite scalability is available out of the box. We provide serverless hosting that scales automatically for you. As an entrepreneur (or product manager, CTO, engineer, etc.), you should not be constantly worrying about load balancing, multi-threading, disaster recovery, and so on. You should be focused on building beautiful and user-friendly UIs, innovative algorithms, versatile APIs, and all the features your user’s could ever dream of.

Ultimately, scale should not be a four-letter word. Scale should be the dream scenario, and a stepping stone to bigger things.

Let us handle the rest.