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.