I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.

A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.

Zooming out a bit. How do you feel about the possibility of quitting your job, spending 1-2 years working on this, failing, and looking for another job? You'd lose income but also have a very interesting life experience. I'm doing something similar and I legitimately don't mind failing because I'm glad I get to have the experience regardless of whether the startup works or not.

A random example. They now make bird feeders with cameras and AI detection to tell you what type of bird you're seeing. But it's so much more satisfying to sit outside watching the bird feeder and then flip through a book to identify the bird. It's slower and old fashioned but it's a calm, satisfying thing to do.

But yeah same thing.

1) Incentivize people on one side to join without the other side. For example Uber paid early drivers money just for signing up even though they had no riders.

2) You provide one side of the marketplace to kickstart the other side. This would be like Uber hiring drivers in the beginning.

This is why starting a two sided marketplace often requires significant capital. They're very hard to start organically.

Another thing I'd suggest is to focus on a niche. Don't try to solve the global problem just yet. Maybe you know a lot of people want to transport books between London and Madrid. Just focus on that to get that market healthy, then add another product or location. This helps you focus your marketing. Also if you go global to start you might have 1000 users on both sides but no matches because everyone is too spread out.

I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.

I can tell they're not using it because the page is getting hit by their user agents but my API is not.

I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.

I don't use GCP, AWS, etc for these reasons. I had a similar algorithmic flag shutdown a previous startup running on GCP and it destroyed the business.

I do have GMail and GSuite for my current business, but I have everything backed up outside of Google and can switch to a new provider pretty quick by changing my MX records. I could use an alternative but I do like GSuite.