Despite what the smart engineers of HN are going to prattle on about running a web app, it's not about systems infrastructure. It's about people. 5-10K user records in the DB, relatively speaking, is a small list and can be kept on a single pretty minimal server instance.
10K user records is not the issue. It's dealing with the humans who use the app on a day to day basis.
Typically getting only a small fraction of your user base to be active in the app is pretty challenging - if you can acquire them in the first place.
That said, having even a few hundred active users can tip the scales in terms of what is manageable, depending on what the app does and whether they're paying money or not. Customer support can be a full-time job or worse. In the early days your users will discover every bug and problem imaginable.
Biggest mistake I ever made was scaling up an active user base on a free product without a revenue model. Twice I managed to hit a sweet spot in acquiring active users but because I couldn't leverage the scale to achieve anything other than more work for myself, I burned out and it collapsed very quickly. If you make more money as you grow, you can afford to invest in delegating responsibilities or at least justify it. Otherwise you've got a very stressful hobby on your hands..
Quick add-on edit:
If you're launching a web app for the first time, the biggest takeaway you should get from the comments on this thread is anticipate that customer support will be a major challenge.
One of the best ways to prevent a flood of CS inquiries is aggressive logging and alerts to squash bugs or outages before they inconvenience too many users. Lots of great comments in here cover that point, so take notes.
I have zero costs though, since it's serverless and all hosted on Google and Github's infrastructure.
For privacy reasons I have made the deliberate choice to not include any log reporting tools or use any tracking services that could possibly make development a whole lot easier.
Thankfully I get some support from a couple of other people that mostly help with small dev tweaks and supporting users, finding out what goes wrong and providing excellent feedback.
I can really recommend setting up a subreddit so that people can help themselves and others, and you can provide some feedback where needed.
All in all the load of user support has been quite easily manageable, though now with Trakt.TV's debacle with the new API there is definite pressure to fix things.
I completely agree with this comment in every point.
However I’ll add that it’s my experience that free customers are the worst, by far for customer support, and that as such rwhitman probably got burned disproportionately. A percentage of free customers demand straight up magic, and get loud in public if you don’t deliver. People who are paying, particularly paying significant amounts of money, expect their money to be well spent and results in proportion with what they pay. IE they tend to be reasonable.
Still - if you where not expecting support to be a major part of this experience - you should now.
10K user records is not the issue. It's dealing with the humans who use the app on a day to day basis.
Typically getting only a small fraction of your user base to be active in the app is pretty challenging - if you can acquire them in the first place.
That said, having even a few hundred active users can tip the scales in terms of what is manageable, depending on what the app does and whether they're paying money or not. Customer support can be a full-time job or worse. In the early days your users will discover every bug and problem imaginable.
Biggest mistake I ever made was scaling up an active user base on a free product without a revenue model. Twice I managed to hit a sweet spot in acquiring active users but because I couldn't leverage the scale to achieve anything other than more work for myself, I burned out and it collapsed very quickly. If you make more money as you grow, you can afford to invest in delegating responsibilities or at least justify it. Otherwise you've got a very stressful hobby on your hands..
Quick add-on edit:
If you're launching a web app for the first time, the biggest takeaway you should get from the comments on this thread is anticipate that customer support will be a major challenge.
One of the best ways to prevent a flood of CS inquiries is aggressive logging and alerts to squash bugs or outages before they inconvenience too many users. Lots of great comments in here cover that point, so take notes.