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by webmaven
1704 days ago
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Your examples aren't equivalent. You're comparing the failure of a prototype or proof-of-concept under stress to the failure of production models under expected conditions. The real risk you're incurring by deploying a prototype to production until traction is demonstrated and scaling becomes an issue is that deferring the design of the 'real' system risks succumbing to second-system syndrome and prematurely trying to make it a 'platform'. Roughly, the first version just has to work, the second has to scale, and the third (assuming you get there that soon) is the one that starts needing to be refactored/generalized into various reusable subsystems. |
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It has to handle the projected load, with some safety margin.
"projected until when?" you ask?
Well, your projections will be wrong. And, your needs will change, which means that you're going to be changing the system anyway.
That's where judgment comes in.
Suppose that each customer is worth $10/month and that the "not scalable" version can handle 1M customers. That's at least $5M MRR when the system is at 50%.
If the scalable version takes significantly longer to develop, you might choose to put it off until you have more money/resources, especially since there will probably be other changes. (And, you don't know where the actual bottlenecks are.)