Chapter 36. Use What's Free
Ben Huh
Ben is the CEO of The Cheezburger Network, owner of popular sites such as Lolcats, Loldogs, and FAIL Blog, and has made more people laugh than anyone we know. He's been a TechStars mentor since 2009.
One way to get leverage over all of the big players out there that you're competing with is to build your business to be more efficient than theirs. This is really easy for me because I'm a cheap bastard.
The Cheezburger Network serves over 10 million page views every day. Luckily for me, I have no idea how many servers it takes to do that. The reason is because we use WordPress (free!) to host our content. We also use YouTube (free!) to host our videos. We share information in the company using Google Apps (free!) and every day I jump on Skype to talk (free!) and videoconference (free!) with people around the world. We use dozens of open source applications (free!) to run our business. Our philosophy is to outsource everything that we're not great at to someone who is a proven and scalable leader, preferably without paying them.
Because we have this philosophy, our developers get to spend 90 percent of their time doing something valuable instead of chasing down complexity. We don't have anybody doing any kind of IT support, because that's not our job. Remember that human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but to reward simplicity. Complexity has ...
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