> One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.

I think reliability is the #1 feature at any stage because if you're unavailable, you're at best useless and more than likely you are actively harmful because your users have an expectation.

However, if you're unavailable outside of times customers don't expect you to be there then you're not actually unavailable. This is more likely for an early stage start-up, but you don't typically choose or know when you're expected to be available nor do you always get to choose when you're unavailable.

In terms of confidentiality, availability, and integrity: I'll bet LastPass would gladly trade availability right now to regain confidentiality.

Our team at AWS we had a poster up on the wall that more or less went:

1. Security

2. Durability

3. Availability

4. Speed

Similar: https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1071088017190711296

> One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.

> I’m not sure it is for 100% of early stage startups,

I mean, it probably depends on the nature of the startup? Platform-as-service seems particularly sensitive to reliability (whether or not it's "#1 feature"), in a way that might not be true of startups in other spaces.

TL;DR -- It's very domain specific if reliability is your number one feature.

For a startup that is hosting other people's production application/data then this is absolutely true. Less than 100% always needs to be addressed.

For a startup that is selling bingo cards then reliability probably isn't nearly as important. I'm guessing there were certain holidays that were more important than others as far as reliability goes though? Maybe patio11 can chime in :)

That's what crossing the chasm is about. Before the chasm are tinkerers who don't mind things failing as much, but after it, people want reliable things that Just Work.