Stop Building for Scale

So, you’ve got the next great business idea, and it’s going to change the world.

You’ve mapped out an ambitious roadmap, researched the best technologies, and selected a modern, highly scalable tech stack. Your architecture diagrams are a masterpiece—microservices, Kubernetes, multi-cloud deployment, event-driven messaging layers. Your database is distributed, your caching strategy is rock solid, and your backend can auto-scale to handle millions of users.

But there’s a problem: your idea is unproven, and you have zero users.

A Sobering Thought

In reality, starting a business is a challenging endeavor that goes well beyond technology. Statistics show that only about 1 in 10 startups survive in the long run. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows:

• 10% fail within the first year
• 50% fail within five years
• 70% fail within ten years

Additionally, venture capital-backed startups tend to have an even higher failure rate, with many failing to generate returns for investors or even return the initial capital.

Importantly, most startups don’t fail because they couldn’t scale. The primary reasons for failure is running out of cash — usually due to a lack of market fit, being out-competed, flawed business models, regulatory challenges, and similar issues. Understanding these factors is crucial for innovators seeking to bring a product to market.

Perfection – The Enemy of Progress

You’re not Netflix. Right now, you’re a nobody. Nobody has heard of you, nobody cares, and you have no users or traction. Talk is cheap, PowerPoints are boring, and investors have heard a thousand pitches just like yours. The only thing that matters in the early days is proving your idea is valuable.

Until you’ve done that, everything else is pretty much immaterial.

Yet, countless founding teams fall into the trap of over-designing, over-complicating, and over-engineering. They spend months—sometimes years—building an unnecessarily complex system, polishing it to perfection without a single user, never mind a customer, all while ignoring wider business-critical matters.

To top it all off, the likelihood that your first version is the final go-to-market solution is slim, to say the least.

Everything Changes

For many startups, getting the most basic (even crude) prototype in front of real users and customers is critical. It is essential to demonstrate a compelling proposition and generate real-world interest in a way that allows you to iterate and learn as you go.

By the time you gain real traction, your customers will have changed and reshaped your product many times over. Features you thought were critical will be ignored. Unexpected needs will emerge. You’ll pivot, tweak, and iterate constantly. If you spent three months polishing something to pixel perfection only to find nobody cares, that’s time wasted.

In reality, progress will likely be slow. You’ll go through many iterations before hitting on what customers truly want. By the time you get to where you need to be, your monolithic spaghetti app will have helped you cross the innovation chasm into a serious fundraising round. Then you can do things “properly”.

All of that is not to say that good patterns and practices should be ignored, or that issues of safety and security should not be taken seriously, but plan and prioritise!

What’s the Best Technology?

The best technology is the one you have access to — the one that lets you move fast and demonstrate value within your resource constraints. For example:

• If you’re a solo founder who knows PHP and MySQL, that’s your tech stack.
• If you’re building a web app with a small team, Node.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL are great choices because they’re widely used and easy to recruit for.

Does it really matter if your stack isn’t the most efficient or scalable? No. Worrying about whether you can handle 10,000 requests per second when you currently serve zero is time wasted. Many use cases don’t require a laundry list of technologies or “blazingly fast” performance.

If, in the unlikely event, you hit performance limits, vertical scaling (upgrading the server) is trivial and buys you more time. By that point, if you’re fortunate enough to have a scaling problem, you will hopefully have worked out your market fit and business model, and investors should be lining up to help you.

Simplicity = Speed.

Conclusion

Getting up and running is challenging, but speed and proof of value are what matter most.

Instead of spending months on a complex polished system that might never be, put systems and processes in place that allow you to move quickly and respond to the market.

In parallel, this will allow you to allocate resources to find that all-important market fit, address compliance issues, develop business models, build an audience, etc.

Get something live quickly using whatever tools you have available. Get real users. Show them what’s possible. Until you do that, scalability doesn’t matter.