Not to pile on, but a storage startup should have had a systems person among the 7 employees. I would do it in the first 10, but the only reason it wouldn't be in the first 5 is that I have the skills myself.
It's really unclear we would have been able to go this far in the first place without AWS.
You could have drastically cut your burn on that last $550K by hiring a sysadmin and bringing it all out of AWS (maybe keeping S3). This would have likely also involved retooling on the app side, but in the long run it would have given you more time for positioning/promotion/etc. All in all, 4th Gen is way late for this.
P.S. Number of photos is basically irrelevant, were you actually using market-fit metrics for infrastructural decision support?
It's really unclear we would have been able to go this far in the first place without AWS.
You could have drastically cut your burn on that last $550K by hiring a sysadmin and bringing it all out of AWS (maybe keeping S3). This would have likely also involved retooling on the app side, but in the long run it would have given you more time for positioning/promotion/etc. All in all, 4th Gen is way late for this.
P.S. Number of photos is basically irrelevant, were you actually using market-fit metrics for infrastructural decision support?