Counting beans and getting hit by a bus

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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