After 20+ years of building software for startups, these are the patterns we keep seeing. Most of them are avoidable.
We've worked with startups at every stage - pre-revenue to post-series B. The technical mistakes are remarkably consistent. Most of them come from building for the company you want to be instead of the company you are.
Building microservices before you have product-market fit
Microservices add operational complexity. You need service discovery, distributed tracing, network resilience, and a deployment pipeline for every service. If you have 5 engineers and 100 users, a monolith is the right answer. You can decompose later when you actually know which parts need to scale independently.
Custom everything
Building your own auth system. Rolling your own payment integration. Writing a custom CMS. Every one of these has a battle-tested solution that's better than what you'll build, and costs a fraction of the development time. Save your custom development budget for the thing that makes your product unique.
More mistakes
- Choosing "trendy" over "boring" technology because it looks good on a job posting
- No automated tests because "we move too fast for tests"
- Hiring senior developers before you've validated the product
- Not investing in CI/CD because "we can deploy manually"
- Building a mobile app when a responsive web app would work fine
The fix
Start simple. Use proven tools. Build the smallest thing that lets you test your assumptions. Everything else can come later - once you have revenue and data to justify the investment.
Ben Arledge
CEO & CTO, CloudOwlWant to talk strategy?
No sales pitch, just an honest conversation about what you're building.