Introducing Protons
The building blocks for your startup
A nice ground rule for bootstrapping your business is to start with variable costs only. So for instance when we select hosting services for our clients who prefer bootstrapping over fundraising we usually recommend Heroku or Amazon EC2 because they both allow for variable hosting costs based on either demand (Heroku) or usage (Amazon).
Variable costs and Heroku
When you are using Heroku to start your product development you can use their free offering and since there aren’t any customers for your business, you don’t pay any hosting costs. But when you have your launch event and are expecting a traffic surge to your webapp you can increase the amount of server processes (Heroku calls them Dynos) with the drag of a slider and pay only for the hours that the Dynos are enabled.
This made me wonder, would it be possible to provide our technology services to startups this way? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could provide our services as if they where variable costs instead of sunk costs?
Introducing Protons
Named after the particle embedded in every atomic core. Protons are the building blocks for your startup. Short weekly iterations set at a customizable burn rate to adapt to your dynamic cash flow. This gives you the opportunity to easily customize the team as demand for specific knowledge or skill changes. This way we can guarantee continuity in almost every scenario’s early stage startups have to deal with like:
- You would love to hire us for your startup but you are in the middle of fundraising? Select one technical co-founder for the coming Protons and take the full team once you receive the funding.
- Crunch time? Important deadline to demonstrate progress to your investors? Reduce waste, select only engineers and no business people for your next proton.
- You are low on cash or need some time for your MVP to gain traction? scale down the entire team and leave one technical account manager on standby for a small portion of the week.
We are experimenting with Protons with one of our bootstrapping clients at the moment.
Auke van Scheltinga
Partner Proto venture technology
