Steve Baxter reveals how he saved his first start-up, SE Net, $700k networking interstate

In my first business, SE Net, I balked at going to industry conferences interstate. They were expensive, there was no airline competition – Adelaide-Sydney on special was $700 return and you HAD to stay a Saturday night due to local tourist board subsidies! And in general, whilst I had a hand in helping the local Internet association scene get up and going , travelling interstate was a whole new thing. 

One year, my business partner Chris and I finally bit the bullet. We flew from Adelaide to a tech conference on the Gold Coast. I think I regretted the expense the entire time, right up until the last night at the lobby bar(!) where I got to chatting with a vendor rep about a problem we were having.

With SE Net, we could only scale by buying more hardware, and lots of hardware. It was worth it, but a bitter pill to swallow because it constrained growth. Like most hardware, our’s used software to do most of the work and our equipment was faring poorly, constantly running a 99% CPU and customers were feeling it. Our vendor had a solution : upgrade to the newest hardware – for over $700k! The new stuff was good, but other than fixing a problem our existing hardware should have already fixed, it was only a “nice to have”. Read more