[duped]

Practically speaking the data model creates very little value. If your startup is trying to make money, features are more important than design for a good stretch.

There comes a time to refactor and fix your architecture but it's usually not at the beginning.

You can design a data model if you don't know what you're building. And no startup really knows what they're building.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

> Practically speaking the data model creates very little value.

That can be said about any cost centre, but you don’t have to drag managers kicking and screaming to get them to buy fire insurance.

Practically what it does is allow the company to keep up velocity and not be distracted putting out fires everywhere.

Of course building features is the team’s entire reason for existing. But there is no advantage to defer refactoring to some later date. The longer you wait the more painful it gets.

Chances are the time never comes, once progress stalls and the company isn’t out of business yet someone will have the brilliant idea to rewrite everything from scratch, which is just lighting money on fire with extra steps.

[duped]

I worked at a startup that rewrote major parts of their product three times before the first Series A check cleared (while I worked there at least, I think they had another rewrite before my time). The company is alive and well because they didn't waste time and money on pondering architecture to solve a very difficult class of problems when they didn't know which problems were worth money yet.

They did do some smart things working around such known-unknowns, like operate as a consultancy for several years while building out the tech stack that would ultimately become the product catalog. That way they didn't have enormous risk associated with rewrites since all users were internal and zero projects actually needed feature or ABI with the stack.

The problems they had when I left were obvious, but the data model wasn't one of them. I'll stand by what I said above (ignoring the typo) - you can't specify a data model for a problem you don't know. And no startup really knows what problems they are going to solve when they start.

[SkyPuncher]

"The next series is the time to fix your mistakes from this one".

No matter what, startups break as they grow. You will need to fix things. Just make sure they're not sooo bad that you can't do it in a timely/affordable way.