Can good engineering kill early-stage start-ups? How to avoid it?

Hey there 👋 - Rahil here!

Happy Saturday to the product, engineering and startup folks reading this newsletter.

In today's edition, we will break down how trying to achieve good engineering can kill your early-stage startup and how can you avoid it.

Estimated Reading Time = 4 minutes and 30 seconds

The short answer is Yes.

In the early days of a start-up, chasing engineering standards and practises will delay the time to market and consume too many resources.

If start-ups spend too many resources on engineering, they might run out of funds before bringing its product to market. Additionally, they may get bogged down in technical details, neglecting other aspects of their business such as customer development, marketing, and fundraising.

Early-stage companies have minimal resources and a tiny team to get to the growth stage. They must cut corners of the corners, any problem that isn't immediately fatal must be pushed into the future. To nail down the product-market fit, first product building goes through plenty of pivots that requires going back to the whiteboard over and over. The engineering behind the first product is usually in very bad condition and a complete overhaul is often felt to be necessary. That would be a fatal mistake, so don't succumb to this temptation.

Netscape's big rewrite in the mid-90s famously allowed Microsoft to come in with the Internet Explorer browser and take over the market.

It is the deliberate accumulation of bad design and shortcuts in the technical system in order to achieve immediate product-market-fit and other business goals. In an established company, you are working under the guideline of established engineering processes and tools, therefore your choices are not so extreme and you can afford to get the engineering right. But you have no choice in a startup - trying to achieve good engineering will kill you. On the flip side, Even if there is an acknowledgement of the need to 'move fast and break things', a good engineering leader still wants to keep the damage minimum by building fewer technical debts.

Technical debts

result when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored

How to avoid it?

A good engineering and product process plus the right mindset can still achieve a speedy delivery by keeping the damage to a minimum.

Mindset

Engineers/coders love to make problems more complex and attempt to solve problems which they don't have. Coming from an engineering background myself, I have also made this mistake and learnt some big lessons.

Priorities products over-engineering- Basic Product development mindset helps to identify the right problem that requires a disruptive solution. Make KISS -Keep it simple stupid- your daily mantra.

Based on my experience, a CTO - who has fought both sides of the battle - Engineering and Products - significantly increase the chances of success for early-stage startups.

Tip:

When looking for a technical co-founder or first engineer for your startups, ensure that the candidate has a passion for both product and technology.

No need to reinvent the wheel- When choosing a tech stack for your product, ask yourself “Is there any off-the-shelf platform readily available that I can use to get the head start” . Even if you cant find the established platform in your domain, try to search Github or other open source repositories for similar projects. Getting something off-the-shelf and repurpose it to solve your problems can provide huge competitive advantage.

Process

Although, I deliberately recommend not investing in any established software engineering and product development process in early days, however having a simple process like below can save your from a lot of trouble in the coming months.

Document each feature (remember being Lean here)- This simple process can save you from tearing your hair out when a speedy delivery is required to scale the products . Every time you get a feature from your co-founders or CEO, simply record the ‘ask’ in simple user story that describes the high level of its functionality, and the technical design to describe how it works. Before developing the next feature, just review old feature documents.

As you can see process does not has to be complicated. You still might have a single engineer/ tech co-founder working in the team who must make sense of both technical and business requirements.

A successful technical co-founder must wear the hat of Engineer, QA, DevOP, Product Manager and Project Manager.

Conclusion

During the early days, since speed and agility are the key asks therefore it is ok to cut the corners when building the first digital product. However, building too much technical debts can also be very lethal. Building too much technical debt is directly correlated with the speed that new features can be introduced. Large, complicated, messy products can't be modified quickly, so features take a long time to build. This can hammer the effort to find product-market fit activities and ultimately startup running out of all the financial oxygen available and die like it never existed.

Therefore, good engineering should be balanced with other critical factors to ensure the success of an early-stage start-up.

Thanks for reading it.

If you are a Tech or Product founder or thinking to start your start-up, you want to join my free newsletter. I will be sharing brutal lessons and tips to build high-impact digital products with a tiny team.