How expansion stage software companies can scale their websites successfully

May 18, 2010

Since we specialize in providing venture capital financing for high growth software or technology enabled companies, our portfolio companies typically normally experience very fast growth in the period before and right after we invest. Curiously enough, usually it is the website infrastructure that first shows the signs of growing pains, as the company gains more customers and builds up considerable buzz in the market. For example, below is a Compete.com chart showing the rapid growth of Zmags, a portfolio company that provides a digital publishing platform for publishers, marketers and brands.
As such, expansion stage companies have to renovate their website content and infrastructure every few years to adapt to the new stage in their lifecycle. The challenge of building a scalable web information structure grows increasingly complex with time, and not all companies handle this issue smoothly along their growth path. In an earlier post, I have already discussed the scaling challenges at an Internet startup, and today I want to point to another great example of how this can be done well at Reddit, a leading social news site.

This article: 7 lessons learned while building Reddit to 270 million page views a month, at HighScalability.com, will provide a very good set of principles and experiences for any website architect who dreams of building massively popular websites. Moreover, some of the principles actually apply to more than just software architecture: for example, the idea that “wasting disk and memory is better than keeping users waiting” – ie, the user experience is paramount which I think any software CEO would appreciate.

HighScalability.com has a treasure trove of similar articles that explore the complexities of scaling websites and the ingenious solutions that arise out of those issues, and in all a great resource to follow.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.