5 Reasons to Build Your Fintech Startup with AWS Activate

One of the challenges many startup founders face is the lack of resources to experiment with their concepts. You need to find out if the target audience wants your product, if it is something that you can build, and if it will work as you expect it to. At this point, you might want some guidance from someone whose expertise you can trust. The tech giant that made $25 billion in net sales in Q1 this year sounds like the right door to knock on.

Why AWS is a match for early-stage Fintech startups

Once I worked with a company producing a chat and video chat application. We needed to try out our concept, and AWS Activate provided credits for that: about $3500 on average per month to run our application in the AWS cloud. This included EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 storage, and R53 primarily. On top of that, our organization worked with an account manager and an Activate contact person to assess and explain the needs, which is a pretty impressive amount of attention given to a pre-funding startup. But your business is unique, and it might need a different tech stack. Let’s see what AWS Activate offers:

• AWS Activate is excellent because it gives credits for the services you are going to use; there is no intermediary, no middle person or organization, and no loan or repayment. 
• The integration or linkage with Accelerators and Summits/Events allows your startup to be supported and have a support network around it, as well as a place to showcase your work and product.
• The ecosystem has matured a lot around the Activate offering. It goes beyond just offering credits.

As I said, the program has a great support system for startups. Still, choosing gear and figuring out how to use it efficiently and cost-effectively are two different things. Further on, I explain how to do it right.

How to build an MVP with AWS Activate with the best TTM

As a startup, you have access to the basic building blocks (Compute, Storage, Network services) and can build applications the traditional way if that’s the kind of skill set you have in-house.

However, with AWS Activate, you also have access to ready-to-use services that simply require data and can be accessed via APIs. For example, Elastic Search, EMR, DynamoDB, Connect, API Gateway, Lambda, and many others that you can connect together to create a product. 

AWS has all the latest technologies available, from Data Science and AI to IoT, Media, Robotics, and even Quantum Computers if that’s what you are into. These services are purpose-built for specific tasks and use cases; these help you accelerate the development of your product because you don’t have to set up the infrastructure nor the applications—they are ready to go.

Taking your time to experiment with these by trial and error is certainly fun. But if you want to know what’s what and how to take a shortcut to the best result without sacrificing time, product quality, or money, you’ll need an experienced partner with FinTech expertise. 

My recommendation is INSART. It’s a Startup Studio & Innovation Lab that has experts who know the services that AWS Activate offers. They can guide you to the right approach and can help you move quickly to launching your solution. You can think of INSART as a companion or a partner for your product. INSART team brings the experience at whatever size of team you need, and for a fraction of hiring in house. INSART does not require sign-on bonus, shares, nor catered lunch at the office. We help you get your MVP built fast and ready for scale!

Developing the product securely with AWS Activate

Cloud security is even better than doing it yourself, especially on a startup budget. 

AWS offers many layers of security already built into its offerings and products to help you manage security easily. Security Groups, VPCs, WAFs, CDN, Certificate and Secrets managers, and many other products are built in, and you don’t have to configure and maintain them yourself. 

Furthermore, AWS has teams of people watching out for security and fraud. AWS will be proactive in shutting down instances or networks when it detects abuse or fraud, which saves you money and protects you. Just imagine hiring and managing a security team yourself—as a startup, you cannot afford to do that.

Shared responsibility model

Another thing to know about cybersecurity in AWS is its shared responsibility model. This model helps free up the startup’s operational resources in handling components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the operational facilities. The customer’s responsibility is managing the guest operating system, additional application software, and configuring the security group firewall (provided by AWS). 

Depending on the services you choose, applicable regulations, and other things, your responsibility will vary, so you need to approach that with great care. Again, this is something INSART can help you with. We leverage these security measures and build applications with layered security, automation, encryption, and least privileged access in mind. Together with AWS, we help you move fast and be as secure as possible.

Enjoy multi-level security and efficiency of expert development.
→ Discover INSART

How AWS Activate helps startups scale their products

AWS is fundamentally built for scale. You can easily scale to thousands of nodes or operations very quickly. Your product can be deployed quickly and in many regions worldwide with services that make it easy to go global. Scalable Architectures are provided by AWS as patterns you can implement and use. Landing zones that you can start with, or consulting services and partners who can help you make the right choices as you build your architecture for scale from the start.

For example, a customer wanted to simulate a million virtual miles driven in a day. Another customer wanted to process Gigabytes of data daily while paying pennies. All this is possible by choosing the right combination of products and services from AWS.

Final recommendations

If you are a CEO or a CTO for a startup or an established company, AWS Activate is the easiest way to get started and scale up your business. But, just as in trying out a new tool for the first time, you need hacks from experienced users to make the most of it. 

If you are unfamiliar with AWS we recommend working with a partner like INSART to quickly come up to speed on how services work. The principles are the same as in traditional consulting; it is the technology choices and the nomenclature that can be overwhelming at the start. In fact, INSART can offer fractional CTOs to partner with your Fintech startup and help you start out quickly. 

If you have experience with AWS, the following recommendations may help:

• Watch your spending. The cloud is built for saving money, but only if you watch it carefully and put in place the tools to alert you. If you don’t, you and your investors will have spent precious resources in vain.
• Focus on your core. Instead of implementing or coding from scratch, consider using services for specific functions, and instead focus on your core value proposition. Queues, ingest mechanisms (Kafka, Kinesis, etc), API Gateways, databases, etc., all work very well as a service, and we recommend not managing that which you can simply use.
• Think of new ways to do things. Lambda/serverless instead of traditional coding mechanisms, Data Lakes instead of data warehouses. Be bold and try some of these new patterns out. They will save you money, but they may take a bit to get used to.

Whether you’re just tiptoeing into the founder game or already stepped into the startup arena, AWS Activate is a great fit for early-stage businesses. Let us know if you have any questions about this program or need some hacks.

Daniel Tet is a Tech Expert at INSART. He worked for Amazon AWS and  
Franklin Templeton as a Lead Architect. Daniel solves hard problems with laser-focused insight, hard work, and high-functioning teams.