The amount of money you have to grow your business is directly proportional to the cost overheads of running your app minus the revenue it generates. We are assuming that the larger your internet service is the more money you will make.

Of course that has yet to be empirically proved.

A service that processes tweets from the firehose in realtime. Assuming you decide to process everything day 1, thats a case where the overhead from running your app could greatly outweigh the revenue it generates.

I mean, I guess? I would question that business and processing model heavily, though. Most sustainable business models show growing from some kind of smaller MVP to a larger full-featured application.

Significant overhead costs to go from nothing to steady-state instantaneously would be enough to scare me.