Start with a Monolith: a startup manifesto

I was going to qualify this by claiming I wrote it after binge watching Silicon Valley, but the truth is I’ve spent a good portion of my life thinking about - and living - the mistakes businesses keep making in the realm of software, product engineering, and entrepreneurship, and I’ve been wanting to distill some of it into a short, and most importantly, actionable format.

Something I could one day nail to my wall if and when I ever get around to launching a startup of my own.

I didn’t expect it to come out as poetry though.

Start with a monolith

Start in the cloud

Start with a stack you know

Lean in for the KISS

 

DevOps is rocket fuel

Tests give you speed

Stay off the bleeding edge

This is your creed

 

Start with an MVP

Forget about scale

Look for that market fit

Make that first sale

 

Obsess over customers

Know why they click

Shorten your feedback loop

Don’t be a dick

 

Don’t chase that VC yet

Start with no dough

Launch early and often

Then pitch once you grow

 

And when you have…

 

Your culture can get out of hand

like a manifesto turned poem

Don’t hire what you cannot coach

Grow slow… or grow home

I will free admit that this is aggressively self-indulgent, pompous even… but it’s not wrong.