Overhead Equals Death
Last month I was listeting to Audible version of the “Company of One” book while riding my bike in an almost dead industrial area in Toronto, that I heard Paul Jarvis saying: “Overhead Equals Death”. Maybe because I was in a dead industrial area that the message really sinked. What if all these big companies didn’t have that overhead of many people and the big land near Toronto downtown? Did they see hiring thousands of people and having such a big land as a prestigue factor that cost them their well being? Don’t we measure a company’s health by its runway (how many months to a company with the current income/expense). So essentially if you have expense near zero, then you can live forever? YES.
In those days I have registered borj.io domain and got google workspace for it which was charging me around 7$. But for the website, I used AWS’s 12 month EC2 free tier with wordpress. Still seeing that 7$ in my credit card was a pain. So I set out to cancel it today. But still will keep the website as is. For email service will use Zoho, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it works and its free.
I got this website (saman.blog) completely free. Although you may say the UI sucks or SEO is not optimized, well in the current stage those are not an important factor for me. I need something that is free, works without any operational overhead and is fast. And this website is so fast you can’t beat the spead, promised. It is deployed on the edges of the internet leveraging Cloudflare’s network with Cloudflare’s Pages. So after I write this post, I just commit it to open source git repo and pipelines will take care of the rest.
Having the lowest overhead, helps you design, build, deliver and move on. I’m not talking just about financial overhead, we have operational overhead too. When the site’s income/benefit is zero, $1 expense is 1 dollar too much. When you are profitable, cost defines your lifestyle. High profit margin means you will have a better runway, more to invest in other projects.
So this post was about running lean financially and operationally. Hopefully will have another product launch soon (assuming this weblog was the first one).
Simple:
git add .
git commit "second post added"
git push
--> Go and pour some tea, everything will be deployed on the fastest network of the world automatically!