| Prior to product market fit you should take the shortest possible path to delivering your essential feature set. You have a short runway and if you hit the end, it's game over. That path may or may not involve a framework. One common developer mistake is to use a framework not because it will save time, but because it's a brand name and they think it'll save them from having to learn about a particular problem space. For example, any developer should be able to build a simple task queue in a couple of days. You can read about how they work, find a simple example or two, and code one. Will it have lots of features? No. Will it scale? No. Does any of this matter before you have product market fit? No. Along the way you make sure you have good separation of concerns in your overall architecture, so that _if_ it turns out there are many actual humans who want to pay for this idea, you can swap out what you wrote and replace it with something better. As a bonus, by the time this happens you'll understand task queues (and in particular what your product needs one for) very well. So picking and implementing the right framework will be easy. If a framework is the easiest way to get to something the market can validate, use it! If it's not, don't. It's really not that hard to understand how any of the common building blocks of a modern web app works. To understand it deeply, sure, that may take 20 years, but at PMF that depth is not critical yet. Let's be honest - 80% of the time when we talk about doing things "right" we are really talking about concurrency and scale. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and so on... |
This is the key right here. Very little else matters. Where a lot of companies get this wrong is they either go the route of picking a minimal framework and writing everything in-house only to have created a very unique monster that took a lot of time at the end or they go all in on frameworks without identifying the bottlenecks as they go along and they wait until its too late to make an easy transition.