It's neither. It's hopefully good content which people get to decide by voting up, or voting down.
You don't game HN by writing link bait, because articles without substance are rarely voted up. You just write what you hope is great content, and HN is one of the places you will seed it if you think it is appropriate for a tech audience.
In attempting the rewrite, the developer who covers the 40% of the existing tech would be a critical component of the new build....so probably not viable to do both.
Yes I agree the details are important, but initially avoiding mentioning the tech means I hopefully got some less biased answers. I found that valuable.
The backend of the app is PHP, and it already has an API. The front end is Adobe Flex. The rewrite would involve dumping Flex for a HTML/JS approach.
We initially went with flex because our app is quite rich in interactivity, but we could do the same thing in JS now.
It's not an enterprise play, but it is B2B. We could cross-train, but hiring more tech's for Flex would be expensive and hard to do (not a lot around). It is a SAAS model, so my customers don't care at all what tech I use (unless they are a tech firm, at which point they screw up their nose at Flex). But they don't mater, as they are not our target market.
Essentially, changing to JS would double our speed of dev in the last 8 months of the runway. But, it may take longer to do than we expect and we may cut off too much runway to make it worth our while.
It may be better to stick with Flex to the point of cash flow positive....then rewrite.
Yes that would be possible - sorry didn't mean to leave that out of option 1. To be honest in the time available it would improve our bottle neck, but not get rid of it.
Option 2 would certainly produce the fastest development setup.
I have realised that in trying not to cloud the decision by telling everyone what the tech was, I may have done you all a disservice by not giving enough information!
So here it is: The existing tech is Adobe Flex. Provides great RIA, but not good for iPhone/iPad. It makes up only the front end of the app, with everything else php based.
The new tech would be to re-write the front end in HTML/JS, leaving the backend php as is.
So another reason for rewriting the code is that we will likely want to dump flex at some point.
Why don't you just book any capital injection as a loan to the company which needs to be paid back at nominal interest at some point in the future? Nothing shady about that.
We recently asked the same question of a number of startups as we wanted to write an article on it, but struggled to get enough to share. I can tell you one big name SAAS product (one you would all know) admitted they converted 2% of traffic into paid accounts. For the record they had a 30 day free trial as their freemium offer.
If you want our data, check out our post we wrote recently here:
You don't game HN by writing link bait, because articles without substance are rarely voted up. You just write what you hope is great content, and HN is one of the places you will seed it if you think it is appropriate for a tech audience.