Founderpath CTO Charlie Martin details the company's financial and team metrics during 2022 while explaining their infrastructure scaling challenges.
Insight
Martin: Add database indices early before tables exceed memory capacity
“I recommend doing this early and often because it gets harder and harder to add missing indices, the bigger tables get. As you start getting into the tens of millions, adding, you know, you basically have to be able to load the table into memory to add the ind…”
Insight
Martin: Microservices and horizontal scaling severely complicate developer environment setup
“So the developer experience got way more complicated, right? So like, you know, we have just like a TypeScript engineer who does front end, and suddenly just to set up his development environment you know, he's gotta understand how Kubernetes works, or, you kn…”
Insight
Martin: Startups should scale vertically before moving to horizontal architecture
“Scale vertically for as long as you can, because it's way simpler. And scale horizontally when you absolutely need to.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Martin: FounderPath Had $1M ARR and Two Engineers in 2021
“This is how it started, twenty-twenty-one. One server, one database, one engineer for half that year, two for the second half. We had, like, 1500 users, one million ARR, and we had absolutely no problems, right? Like, we just had one cloud server and one datab…”
Disclosure
Founderpath reached $75M ARR and 20,000 users with seven engineers in 2023
“So, in twenty-twenty-three, by this time we have three databases because as you'll see shortly, we, we've also split into microservices. Seven engineers, about 20,000 users, something like seventy-five million ARR”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Martin: Founderpath processes 200M rows daily with four full-time engineers
“Three of those guys are actually contractors, so we have four full-time engineers, and we ingest about twenty million new rows of data per day, and every single day we have to rerun all the calculations on all of the data, so it's like, it's at like two hundre…”