ok so for context ive been doing this for about 3 years now. startups bring me in when shit hits the fan - not the "we ran out of money" fan, the "our product literally cannot scale and we have no idea why" fan and theres this pattern that shows up EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. month 1-6: everything is great. moving fast, shipping features, customers are happy, lifes good month 7-12: things start slowing down. weird bugs popping up. "we'll fix it later" becomes the team motto month 13-18: you literally cannot add a new feature without breaking 3 old ones. every deploy is stressful month 19-24: youve now hired 3 more engineers and theyre just maintaining the existing mess. not building anything new month 25+: rebuild from scratch or watch your startup die in slow motion **what i found in those 47 codebases:** like 89% had zero database indexing. ZERO. your app is slow because youre searching through 100,000 records on every single request. thats not a bug thats just... why 76% were paying for like 8x more servers than they needed. the average is 13% utilization - youre paying for 100 servers and using 13 of them. burning $3k-15k a month for nothing 68% had auth vulnerabilities that would make any security person have a panic attack 91% had no automated tests at all. so every new feature is literally russian roulette **the math on this is depressing:** avg engineer salary is like $120k right stripe did research showing devs spend 42% of time dealing with bad code so for a team of 4 over 3 years thats $600k+ just... wasted. on maintaining garbage then add $200-400k to rebuild plus 6-12 months of lost revenue during the rebuild total damage per company: $2-3M and founders dont realize until month 18-24. by then youve raised series A based on growth that is about to completely fall apart **what actually prevents this:** honestly just spend 2 weeks on architecture before writing code. i know its boring and you wanna ship fast but those 2 weeks save you 18 months of hell think "what breaks at 10,000 users" not "what works for 100 users" - your db queries, file uploads, background jobs, everything needs to handle 100x day one automate tests from the start. if you cant click one button and know nothing broke youre just gambling pick boring tech. react/node/postgres is boring and thats GOOD. you can hire for it, theres stackoverflow answers, it doesnt randomly die at 2am get someone whos done this to review your architecture in WEEK ONE. not month 12 when its too late **the part nobody wants to hear:** most technical cofounders and first eng hires are really good at coding but have never architected something that scales. its like being a great cook but never running a restaurant kitchen during dinner rush real example from last month - saas company spending $47k/month on aws i did a 3 day review and found: * running 40 servers when they needed 6 * storing files in literally the most expensive way possible * db queries taking 4 seconds that should take 40 milliseconds new bill: $8,200/month they saved $38,800 PER MONTH. thats $465k a year. for 3 days of work. **why im posting this** because im tired of watching founders burn 18 months and $500k-2M learning lessons that are completely avoidable "move fast break things" works when youre facebook with unlimited money. for your startup its just suicide **if youre building something right now ask yourself:** * what breaks at 10x current users? * do you have automated tests? * can your db handle 100x the queries? * would your infrastructure cost $50k/month at 10k users? if you said "i dont know" to any of these youre building on quicksand happy to answer questions about tech stack or architecture stuff in comments. ive seen this movie too many times. Meir Avimelec Davidov (You can search me over linkedin) Founder & CEO of gliltech software