[codenlearn]

I'm an engineer and talking from experience here.

1. keep the db schema simple. remember you are startup things change, so does the db schema so does your architecture.

2. One piece of advice from personal experience, Microservices usually don't work well for startups try building your solution as a modularized monolith.

3. always make decisions that are reversible (2 way door) and make sure coming back is also easy.

4. for any features you release have qualitative and quantitative metrics and more importantly guard rail metrics.

5. where ever you can use the an off the shelf solution like feature flags (launchdarkly), product analytics (amplitude) use them. These are solutions used by countless startups do not reinvent the wheel.

6. prioritize customer feedback, that is going to get you money and they are going to help make your product better. Instead of "failing fast" prioritize on "learning fast".

7. Be focussed on solving the problem don't romanticize the solution.

[james-revisoai]

Can you expand on some good guard rail metrics you've used/seen please?

[codenlearn]

The 2 metrics I've used in the past is

1. Bounce rate combined with Session length

- Bounce rate can be defined as % of users who leave only after viewing one or few pages. The reason at least I coupled bounce rate with session length is atleast in the app we work there are few personas that prefer to stay in one page for a long period of time and do some interactions. Bounce rate combined with Session length always give us a good picture are folks using the feature(s) as intended. One thing we did was set a baseline metric where we first measured session length on the app as well as per page basis, and after that we could build the bounce rate. Amplitude works well for this case

2. Churn Rate - number of users who stop using the app over a given period. This should be easy to do by querying db if you maintain some session duration information.