[LASR]

The single-most important lesson I've learned building products as a founding engineer in a successfully exited startup: weighing tradeoffs and deciding which software architecture to use is the wrong place to dedicate mental energy.

It's always the product. It comes first. Then the business. If you're lucky you may become a pawn in a larger battle among giants and you'll get acquired before you attempt to make any profit.

If you end up in a place where your chosen architecture is no longer capable of supporting your scale - that's a happy place that very few teams get to experience. It means you've survived.

Given that, whatever allows you to quickly get things in the hands of real customers (which depends quite heavily on what the actual product is) is the best architecture.

We've hired some experienced engineers from giga-corp FAANG etc into tiny startups. The transition is hard, because there the opposite is true. You have a business already, and you have a well-defined goal you need to achieve with multi-year roadmaps etc. There, yeah you should probably decide on architecture first.

[solatic]

Sad to see this isn't the top comment. Unless or until you have a built-in source of guaranteed demand - the only thing that matters is product agility in order to find customer demand. Without demand, you have no revenue, investors lose interest, the money runs out, and people stop paying you to work on that system. Then everything gets thrown out. And "demand" is not "we have paying customers" - it's having sufficient revenue, for whatever that means for that particular org.

[baby]

I think we’ve been spoiled by move fast break things type of startups, and indeed if you’re in a competitive field you might have to fight for your survival.

But truly successful projects are the ones that are worked on and improved for decades. Long-term work means that you will have to be conscious about being clean, and care about constant refactoring and simplification, and design decision that will prevent paralysis down the line.

There’s a reason twitter did not change for like 10 years and apps like Instagram are able to adopt new trends super quickly. (Unrelated: since the Instagram team is behind Threads, I predict that Threads is going to evolve really really fast and be harsh competition to twitter over time)