Mark Collier

I’m helping a friend of mine put together a business plan for an internet startup he’s working on. Just yesterday, I was encouraging him to check out Amazon S3 since there are “a TON of start ups using it” and it’s “very helpful for when your service blows up at sxsw”. Then low and behold it crashes today.

This did spark another intriguing thought, though, due to the fact that his particular business model is largely based on affiliate revenues (amazon associates in particular). So, you could literally see most of the variable costs and revenues in one dashboard from amazon! Break even is (roughly) defined as associates revenue=S3+EC2 bills.

I thought that was kind of interesting, and wondered if there were any other start ups out there that can measure the health of their business just by logging into Amazon. Is there a play here for a consolidated dash board, easy integration with quickbooks, or via some connection to mashup tools like Sproutweb to make creating a business a 3 click affair?

Of course, with today’s S3 crash that notion might scare some folks. Still, it has to beat doing it all yourself.