Choosing the right tech stack is a technical task, handled by tech teams when they get to their tasks. Yet this moment can influence the entire product development and business model. So, it needs a closer look.
In this article, we will explain to business owners, start-up teams, and anyone wishing to start a digital business how to select the right tech stack to build a strong business model from the very beginning, and how technical strategy consulting for startups can help you with this task.
Let’s get started!
Why selecting the right tech stack is important
The selection of the tech stack influences many aspects of your future business growth. The main ones are:
- Hiring teams and professionals: growing your team is an important part of your operations, and if you select narrow niche technologies to code the core of your product, you will face challenges in hiring and finding the right people.
- Scalability: if your frameworks and structures can’t handle growth, you’ll be limited by the technical constraints of your wrong tech choices and will lag as others move forward.
- Ecosystem: Although the tech stack depends on your product’s needs and specifications, the approaches to technology development are not the same. Some technologies offer many third-party integrations, while others provide better open-source support and faster problem resolution. It is important to consider the other sides of technologies in relation to your product needs.
Common tech stack mistakes
Although both tech stacks and business needs of companies differ, the mistakes are common for all, and they are:
Paying too much attention to trends: there are trends in technologies, like in everything else, and this pushes some companies to go for the popular technology, although the better approach is to ignore the trend and go for the tech that best fits your business.
Over-engineering from the start
Some companies choose not to develop the product incrementally but to implement complex microservices before they reach product-market fit. This leads to unnecessary feature walls and additional expenses that could have been avoided.
Under-engineering
Conversely, some companies decide not to invest in microservices architecture and build a product as a tightly coupled monolith, which is not well-suited for scalable growth.
Ignoring DevOps and infrastructure
The well-organized development process contributes to future success. Ignoring it at the entry stage may steal the team’s ability to bring incremental changes to the product without interrupting operations.
With all of this in mind, it is clear that selecting the startup tech stack is a complex process that often requires external help.
How an outsourced consulting firm can help you choose the right tech stack
Choosing the right technology for your product requires experience across architecture, DevOps, security, scalability, and product growth.
An experienced company, especially one that has projects in your niche, can help with all of them. Their help will mainly run along the following directions:
- Strategic stack selection – the team that has worked with numerous similar projects can evaluate the maturity, ecosystem strength, and long-term viability of the technologies you need, align architecture with your business model, prevent over-engineering and under-engineering, and human-friendly technology.
- Architecture design – the team will help you define the modular architecture, so that the elements of your products can be developed independently, establish clean data models as a basis for future monitoring, reporting,g and AI integration, and plan for horizontal scalability.
- Involving broader expertise – the in-house team is usually limited to 5 specialists, who often don’t have the deep, narrow expertise needed to solve bottlenecks or consult on key features. The external company usually has a team of specialists on staff. Even if they are not assigned to your project, they can be easily engaged as needed without the extra expenses associated with head-hunting and hiring.
- Establishing engineering best practices: experienced partners often implement standards tested through experience on hundreds of projects; therefore, they can guarantee a strong documentation culture, best practices in deployment automation and performance monitoring, reliability engineering principles, and security-by-design frameworks.
- Cost optimization and infrastructure efficiency – an experienced team will help you avoid different bottlenecks and help organize the whole working processes more effectively, mainly they can help avoid over-provisioning cloud resources, design auto-scaling properly without extra spendings, structure environments efficiently, avoid vendor lock-in risks, and do all this following the best industry standards in shortest terms, promising the faster access of your future product or service to the market.
Summing up
Setting the startup tech stack wrong from the start can cause multiple problems and block your project’s future success. Therefore, it is a good idea to spend time and resources on architecting a viable, robust, and scalable technological profile from the very start.
