Pursuing Simplicity Over Hype
Tags: architecture, startup, mvp, webdev
Published: 2023-07-08 16:58:02

Hello, aspiring tech enthusiasts! I thought I’d share my perspective, which, while not necessarily related to coding, may provide valuable insights for those contemplating tech tools to bring your startup ideas to fruition.

I recently found myself engaging in an enlightening conversation with a junior from my college. Over dinner at a local Izakaya restaurant, we broached the subject of establishing reliable businesses that prioritize consistent profitability over fleeting tech trends. Let me elaborate on why I hold this stance.

With nearly a decade’s experience working in tech startups, I’ve observed the rise and fall of numerous enterprises. Startups often launch with innovative ideas, adopting the latest tech trends popularized by large multinational corporations. This move may help the team appear avant-garde, but does it serve the business’s core needs?

Often, startups begin with employing the micro-services design pattern, architecting their systems to handle millions of requests per second, implementing real-time streaming like Kafka, and using micro-frontend architectures. Everything is deployed to Kubernetes on AWS. Sounds impressive, right? But where might they be going wrong?

In the early stages, startups are primarily concerned with finding a product-market fit and expanding their customer base. However, instead of rapidly launching new features to test their ideas via Minimum Viable Product (MVP), they often concentrate on developing large-scale systems. They keep incorporating trending tech tools into their products, continually raising venture capital until death. Unfortunately, I’ve heard this narrative far too many times.

The central point I want to highlight is the importance of starting with a straightforward system before scaling it up in line with user growth. Contrary to popular belief, most systems don’t fail due to inadequate sophistication or scalability, but rather because they lack a user base willing to use or pay for their services.

In today's tech world, there are countless Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings available, allowing you to test your ideas quickly without needing a massive engineering team to build a scalable infrastructure. To get started, you can simply build a Modular Monolith and deploy backend services on [AWS Serverless](https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/) or [Google Cloud Run](https://cloud.google.com/run/). You can host a [React](https://react.dev/)/[Vue](https://vuejs.org/)/[Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) app on [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) or [Vercel](https://vercel.com/), utilize [PlanetScale](https://planetscale.com/) or [Neon](https://neon.tech/) for serverless database services, and employ [Axiom](https://axiom.co/) for log ingestion and analysis.

Once you’ve found a product-market fit and have a customer base willing to pay, and the platform’s user growth is sustainable, that’s when scaling becomes crucial.

**In conclusion**, it’s perfectly fine to design a scalable system from the outset. However, it’s even more important to build a simple, adaptable system that can adjust to future growth patterns. Remember, these insights are mainly geared towards startups and might not be as applicable to established tech companies, who have ample resources to invest in tech infrastructure and personnel.

_A hearty shoutout to my college junior, whose insightful conversation inspired me to pen down this article. My aim is to share the wealth of knowledge I’ve acquired continually, and I hope to do so more frequently. Let’s stay connected. https://learnwithgot.com_