The anti-guide. Eight ways to drown your own startup (part 1)

You’re starting to develop your app: you’ve got an idea, you have thought through the business model, you are doing pretty well. And now the moment comes: the choice of technology. It seems like a really simple matter, but it can also wreak havoc on your business. So how to drown your startup? Just read this anti-guide.

1. Choose the technology that will ridiculously extend the production time

The best would be the one that costs you a fortune – you will quickly get rid of money, meaning you will experience one of the most popular reasons of startup failures. It is obvious you don’t want to finish your project as soon as possible. Put obstacles on your way! Be a masochist and resign from a language with pre-made components! Build everything yourself from the scratch!

The authorization system for example. It is true that there are methods to easily expand the authentication with Facebook or Google (even here: rubygems.org). The same goes for other components, such as payments or geolocalization. But shortcuts are not for you!

2. Make configuration a Sisyphean task

Imagine desiring a new sofa for your room. You have two options to choose from. The first one: you can buy an assembled sofa and you can sit on it as soon as you have it delivered (certainly not an option!). The second choice: you can buy a sofa that you have to assemble yourself – screw by screw, plank by plank, preferably wasting all your holidays for it… You just need to spend hours on configuration instead of getting a ready product, thanks to which the app will work after only a few minutes on the server.

You’ll have it guaranteed that your programmer will definitely turn gray worrying about that complicated setup of your project. This way, he won’t be able to focus on his job and deliver features. Way to go!

3. Supportive society ? Say “no!” to conveniences!

Among the open sourced languages, the support of the group is by all means economic: when a programmer wants to solve a problem, firstly they search for answers amongst the society. It is unbelievably likely that someone has already seen the problem and fixed it. That is an unfavourable situation – a programmer can save their time on debugging, and this is not what we are all about!

“Working in groups” means sharing your experience and knowledge willingly. Lack of such exchange of information will surely lower the work efficiency and from here we are very close to achieving our goals. Unfortunately, in bigger cities the programmer meetups function vigorously (not to mention Łódź Ruby User Group), there are plenty of well written, merit-related blogs and professionals active on Twitter. The base of knowledge and flow of the freshest information is a really big thread – do not let it seduce you. That is not the way!

4. Maturity is overrated

Some of the languages fit the needs of startups, others don’t. Choose the one that didn’t work for other entrepreneurs – thanks to this, you will duplicate somebody else’s mistakes and seal down your projects. Look around which technology was chosen by startups that succeeded: Airbnb, Ask.fm, Basecamp, Bloomberg, Dribble, SlideShare. Now you know what to avoid.

This guide à rebours has been created, unfortunately, on personal observations.

To be continued.

This essay was previously published on “Mam Startup”..