I really enjoyed reading this. Much like Instagram, which had thousands of users sign up on the first day, if you aren't able to scale because of your skill level, wouldn't that affect usage and lead to comments like: 'The app/site is so slow'?

Aren't comments like "the site is too slow" similar to "the city is too crowded"?

Twitter famously had a "fail whale" but it didn't stop the company from growing. If you have market demand (and I guess advertising) then you can get away with a sub-optimal product for a long time.

> Twitter famously had a "fail whale" but it didn't stop the company from growing. If you have market demand (and I guess advertising) then you can get away with a sub-optimal product for a long time.

Agreed, but there's still an element of survivorship bias there. Plenty of companies failed as they couldn't keep up with their scaling requirements and pushed the "getting away with a sub-optimal product" for too long a time.

Do you have some good examples?

This touches the toupet fallacy: "I never saw a large company fail to grow large because of deferred scaling"

Friendster might fit though: https://highscalability.com/friendster-lost-lead-because-of-...

I agree. Go fast with a suboptimal architecture. If success arise, throw away version 1 and rebuild from scratch. Often is more effettive.

Reddit is still around.

It depends on the adoption model.

If it’s just “sign up any time you want and go”, yes, it can go that way.

If it’s “join that waiting list” or “book a call” (for KYC purposes or whatever), you have a buffer.

If user count is more or less constant (most internal websites, for example), it’s probably not an issue.

And so on.