Scale Fail Scale: A start-up's story of surviving death
summary
A start-up builds rugged ePaper POS terminals, wins a 2,000-unit pre-order and ships just over 1,000 units, then watches 80% of transaction volume vanish when its largest distributor collapses; hardware proves too costly so the business kills hardware business and pivots to an Android app plus Bluetooth printers at ~$100 per kit. Back-end migrates from App Engine/datastore to Docker/Kubernetes and SQL, adds GraphQL to cut mobile round trips, secures bank pilots and fresh funding to scale again.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (28)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:30Rolling blackouts
- 2:10Access to essential services
- 3:10Back in 2011
- 3:55Making our own hardware
- 5:33Testing in taxis
- 7:49Electricity
- 8:19EPaper
- 10:04Manufacturing
- 11:41Scaling
- 13:32Challenges
- 15:33Transparency
- 17:32Leading through failure
- 18:01Survivor bias
- 19:22The Lean Startup
- 21:16The Challenge
- 22:29The Solution
- 25:04What Changed
- 28:27Biggest Pointers
- 29:53Conclusion
- 33:40Cache
- 34:50Latency
- 36:43Branding
- 41:23Stock control
- 43:25State of mind
- 45:17Security issues
- 47:25Scale in countries
- 49:55Family
related talks
01h 37mStartup in action
39mBarely succeed! It's easier!
34mGot a technical idea? How to build a company from there
33mRethinking How Startups Are Built and Scaled
23mFrom coding to building a company: My journey in starting a successful product...
48mHow (not) to build a startup?
25mPITCH Final
25mKeeping Small Retailers Afloat: Scaling a Marketplace Business