How we build an MVP on a budget with BizSpark and Azure

http://www.apirise.com/4-reasons-why-we-love-bizspark/

by geopsist • 12 years ago

52 28 12 years ago

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

I'm also using Bizspark and the fact that you can do everything with a 115 € (Europe) monthly budget is probably not well-known :)

geopsist5• 12 years ago

Yep this was my original thought. Thank you for the reply :)

karterk• 12 years ago

Thanks for writing this. A small feedback: "The power of transformation over APIs... without the hassle." does not really convey what you do to a potential customer. People have very short attention spans and you have only a few seconds at most to convey what your service does. Most people will not scroll down to read more otherwise.

spo81rty• 12 years ago

I agree. No idea what they do based on that description.

geopsist5• 12 years ago

Same here. Thank you for the feedback. We will try to make it clearer! :)

cpard2• 12 years ago

what we do is to offer a configurable proxy for APIs where someone can configure various aspects of them, e.g. transform and filter request & response bodies, headers etc, simplify and accelerate the work a developer has to do in order to interact with APIs and integrate them with her apps. leting us know that we dont communicate well what we do is probably the most valuable feedback we can get at this point and it is much appreciated!!!

geopsist5• 12 years ago

thanks a lot for your feedback! We are trying to make it better. Got your point ;)

PS. I hope the post info will prove useful :)

GFischer• 12 years ago

BizSpark is really great. In the article's case, they're not using Microsoft technologies, but in my case, I use Microsoft at work and I'm very comfortable with their tools.

For a side project, we'd started out with an unfamiliar stack (Grails + Postgre hosted on Amazon AWS), and kept running into roadblocks (not the tech stack's fault), but we missed some very nice enabling technologies with Microsoft software.

So, when we signed up with BizSpark, we started using Azure, and we're now leveraging the SQL geolocation capabilities (which Postgre also has), and our knowledge of .NET.

As the article says, you don't need to use the Microsoft stack, but if you're used to it, it's a HUGE enabler (we had discarded using Microsoft at first due to the perceived cost).

I'm a believer that, for an MVP, you have to keep to whichever technology you're comfortable with. In my case, it was the Microsoft stack.

nyrina• 12 years ago

Just be careful down the line. Those costs you are talking about are still there, they are only delayed because of BizSpark.

Having BizSpark did wonders to the company I'm in, but when the 3 years ended, there was a lot of hard work and even more tears because of it. BizSpark's entire reason for existence is to lock you into Microsoft products, especially their SQL server.

ryanjshaw2• 12 years ago

What were the problems you encountered?

As a potential BizSpark user my impression was that:

- after 3 years I get to keep using the licenses I acquired, leaving only hosting costs to be concerned about

- if I don't have enough capital/revenue to cover my hosting costs at that point it's highly likely my business is not worthwhile pursuing further anyway

- for my particular solution I don't envision needing much server power (and what's provided is pretty powerful) so additional licensing costs are not a problem (I can see this being an issue for other businesses)

adrr• 12 years ago

I used bizspark at my last job but didn't use Azure. We were on AWS, and it applied just fine to EC2 instances running Windows Server(you don't pay the additional costs for ms licensing). Only thing it didn't work on was the MSSQL RDS instances we had, we ended up running our own Mssql server. One thing to note, you can also get credits from AWS if you're a startup. I've seen $25k to $50k being thrown around and my current company received enough credits that i didn't need to pay for service for over a year.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

That's cool, but you could also build an MVP using PHP and MySQL on cheap shared hosting or a cheap $5/month Digital Ocean instance. Unless you are on the Microsoft stack, you probably aren't saving a ton of money that you couldn't save by making different decisions.

Probably the more valuable opportunity in BizSpark would be to get any extra marketing out of the relationship with Microsoft. Being a "success story" can get you press, links, etc. which is very much more valuable than saving money on hosting.

ktavera2• 12 years ago

You'd still be saving money, you can run PHP and MySQL on Azure and get enough server power to host your production app for free instead of paying a shared hosting company $5 for something only sufficient for development.

geopsist5• 12 years ago

yes I agree

geopsist5• 12 years ago

I agree... There may be many solutions available! In our case we found the best value for money case.

felixrieseberg• 12 years ago

Hey guys, Felix from Microsoft here. Some of you may know me as the guy who's working with YC companies. A quick PSA:

We sponsor YC companies with $60,000 in free Azure usage.

Get in touch with me at felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com if you have any questions!

batuhanicoz• 12 years ago

A bit of topic but I can't seem access apirise.com from Turkey. Connecting via VPN works.

cpard2• 12 years ago

this is strange, we'll have a look at it although you should not have any problems accessing it from anywhere. Thanks for letting us know though.

taude• 12 years ago

We used BizSpark and a MSFT stack for our first iteration of the MVP (C#, ASP.NET MVC3, ServiceStack, etc.). It always raised eye-brows in a negative way when taking meetings with VCs and Angel investors. I'm not sure why, but they almost always asked a question "why MSFT? stack" and not XYZ that all their other companies were building in. I always felt like we should leave the tech stack off our slides... And they almostnever liked the answer I gave which was something along the lines "because I could build it fastest this way"

We've since transitioned into a Python/Java/Postrgres stack. With no real complaints.

I wonder, though, if there's any stats on companies not liking to aquire tech built on MSFT vs companies built with Java. I did a project once for one of the biggest names in enterprise software security, mostly a Java shop, and they had acquired a C#-based product, and I heard nothing but gripes from the tech team about that...

At the time, one thing annoying was licensing Bizspark to run SQL server on AWS. From what I understand, this is fixed now, but back then we had to pay for a SQL Server instance, despite being part of Bizspark plan.

Another thing that I wonder, if anti-MSFT bias is a regional thing. LIke if we were based in Seattle, would it be beneficial?

For the record, I still like a lot of the MSFT stack, and it's great to see them embracing some other technologies, like say Node.JS on Azure and feel they'll do a lot to promote some of these newer OSS technologies into the enterprise world.

EDIT: one other thing, we didn't have access to Azure at the time (it was just starting out, and I don't think it was part of the program). But Azure as a hosting option for managing the MSFT server licenses and such is a pretty enticing option.

How we build an MVP on a budget with BizSpark and Azure

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