Tech Stacks for Founders

What you need to succeed.

A solo tech founder needs to choose their stack with utmost care. Too simple, and you’ll waste time reinventing wheels. Too complex, and things get out of hand, fast.

The tech stack for your startup also needs certain traits:

• Familiar

• Full-featured

• Fast Iteration

Familiar

Unless you’re inventing new technology, or just messing around, you need to pick a tech stack you’re familiar with. If you don’t, you’ll spend too much time learning and making mistakes – something you should have already done before you decided to bootstrap a startup.

Indeed, it is often tempting to pick a shiny new tech stack – especially in the name of scalability. “If I use this, my app will scale for free!” you might think. “It’ll make my life so much easier down the line!”

Don’t do it. You’re nowhere near “down the line”. You’re here, now. In the present. Without any users, and without any revenue.

Take it from me. I’ve seen it and done it many times in my career. It’s not worth it. Your time is better spent building features, launching, and learning what your users want, rather than what your tech stack wants.

Pick something familiar. And definitely don’t start yak shaving.

Full-featured

The whole point of a startup is to build something useful worth paying for. The stack you use is a means to that end.

Pick something with a strong community.

A strong community covers gaps in documentation. A strong community builds and maintains high quality libraries that help you launch much faster. A strong community publishes real-world experiences, helping you solve relevant problems and teaching you best practices.

A solo founder needs a community to lean on. Shoulders of giants to stand on. No one can do it alone – especially on a time crunch to sustainability.

Fast Iteration

Once you launch, it’s a cat and mouse game between you and your users’ feedback. You need to respond to your users, and you need to do it fast.

The deployment part of your tech stack needs to be simple. Committing a fix and pushing live should take no longer than a few minutes.

Beware of hosted backends like Firebase. Unless your app is exceptionally simple, the tradeoff in deployment & architecture complexity – and also the unfamiliarity – is not worth the scalability you might never need.

My Tech Stack of Choice

The stack I’ll be using for my startup is old, tried, and true: Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku.

I’ve commented before on how good Rails is. It fulfills the above criteria with flying colors. It’s invaluable as a solo founder; I honestly don’t know how I could reach my ambitions without it.

As I write more posts on my progress, I’ll also be highlighting aspects of Rails that helped accelerate the app towards my goals. It’s been bliss so far, and I can’t wait to say more.