[Netcob]

I'm not saying they weren't successful. As someone who tends to over-engineer things, I do admire their ability to get a product out quickly - I think for a startup that was probably the right decision!

But that's what I've been missing from your article - more on the distinction between the approaches, and the drawbacks of having a thin back-end layer as the product / company is growing. In the beginning I thought you were talking about how to make your startup more efficient and flexible - basically consciously building some technical debt, having weighed your options.

But if that's not the idea - personally I don't know how to scale with this approach, neither technologically nor in terms of team structure. The thin back end layer could work though if you have a lot of small products that are independent of each other - developed by small teams that can afford to act like early startups. Maybe that's what you meant, but I didn't really get that from the article.