What possible advantage would "real" devops infrastructure provide? Unless you're doing something so far out if the ordinary (or infrastructure is your advantage) there is zero value in building your own early on. You're suggesting they find a CTO/architect/php developer, all in one... That's not reality.

In a big comanies all three roles need a very different skill set, because of politics, splitting saying and doing and so on. In a start up environments skills needed for all three roles are very similar.

Do not take external money. The longer you can bootstrap the better. I know you've heard this a bajillion times, and I know the allure of a few mil in the bank. It's not worth it. Hold off as long as you possibly can. We've used Google's AppEngine to scale. It's not the easiest env to work with, but at 30+ staff and millions in revenue we have yet to hire a sysadmin (ie. overhead!). When load increases we just get charged for more resources. Sounds like you have to parallelize: start MVP rebuild, and do mitigation on current platform. Four years in we are on the fifth major rev of our core processing system; point being that things change and you need to prepare for ongoing evolution.

Exactly what you heard. Some VC's wanted the entire eng team to move to SV (not trivial if it's more than just you and cofounder) but we managed to not go there.

If you have an existing company that's been around for a bit you may want to look into L1 visas.

Plan on moving here for a while as a founder.

So... who is your customer? The card holder? The issuing institution? How much would YOU pay for this, and how likely would YOU be to give a reminder app banking access? I'm not saying this isn't worthwhile, but as described, it's not that appealing.

The customer is the card holder. Main target would be people with multiple credit cards.

I would pay $10/month for this service.

All access would be handled by a 3rd party secure API (Yodlee).

So Higher Ed MOCC platforms need improvement. The original title is overly broad.

Having said that, your experience and criticism reflect many people's experiences. Just a little while ago there were some posts here about the Stanford NLP online class and the (perceived) difference in value vis-a-vis the "real" Stanford class...

I considered including MOOC platforms in the title, but there's very few people who even know what that is. I probably should have refined it. Thanks for the feedback.

It's a cheap fingerprint scanner, probably coupled with an access code. Unhackable? Seriously??

There is a reason those things disappeared from all the laptops over the last few years.

You will also need a bunch of other things. To really get the benefit of automation in SF, you'll need the enterprise version. Then there are Gmail plugins (we use cirrus insight), billing platform integration, etc. etc.

Getting SF configured so it makes sense for you will take time and $. There are also a number of little gotcha's, like inability to gracefully deal with email aliases. Might not be a problem for you, but we find that a number of people use vanity email addresses, personal Gmail, etc. to communicate - and SF becomes exquisitely painful suddenly.

In short, unless SF solves a serious sales process automation problem for you, don't go there.

Ah - also, analytics. You'll want the Good Data analytics on top, especially if you're in SAAS space. Good stuff and greatly increases the value of SF.

any other solution I should be considering?

I'm not sure whether this is passion or greed. Leaning towards the latter.

I quickly checked their company and the acquirer and it doesn't seem like there is enough money to 'retire in a house with an ocean view', not until it's in Nicaragua, of course.

Congratulations, anyway :)

Bank account is not required to incorporate in the US. Whoever is telling you this hasn't done their homework.

Sorry, Its a mistake on my part. I'm going to launch a SaaS product, Bank account is mandatory for billing, not incorporating.

Why use the US and not a jurisdiction like the UK?

probably because in UK (and EU) the online billing solutions are a nightmare. I would do the same - just to be able to use Stripe.

Based on a chat with Stripe around last Startup School, you can not use Stripe by just incorporating in the US without being physically present in US.

Use Earth Class Mail to get a street address, or use the address of your corporate agent.

How do they evaluate physical presence? exactly.

Not sure how Stripe does it, but could be based on utility bills or a social security number.

Personally I think this one is over the top. Much prefer a more clinical version of these:

- technical explanation of the timeline & events

- what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again

- how we're compensating customers who were affected

- brief mea culpa/ personal apology (proportional to degree of inconvenience!!)

Keep the first three language-neutral and easy to read, and reserve emotional stuff to the end. People know you had a bad day, and how you went about resolving the issue will convey the effort you've put in.

Balsamiq will have other outages in the future, it's the reality of IT. What sort of pictures will they need for when the next outage is 3 days??

I totally agree. I want to hear what went wrong, how it was fixed, what can be learned about it. I don't really want an apology at all, I just want an understanding of why something happened and what can be done to prevent or mitigate it in the future.