Did you know 95% of successful Start-ups use React? 

Well that’s not true, but the technology of your company can greatly hinder or promote your company’s growth. Here’s why.

As an early stage company it’s vital that you can build and iterate as quickly as possibly. The minimum viable product that you just released or plan on releasing mostly likely won’t satisfy your customers for long especially if your product is business to consumer.

Releasing your minimum viable product is like receiving your license to drive. Now it’s time to practice or in this regard test, test, test different features and product ideas as quickly as you can, to find product market fit. 

Do you know why being wrong is right for your company? If not, read my last article here.

Now back to our original topic.

Your company’ speed of iteration will be closely tied to finding product market fit. Take this for a grain of salt but if we compare say a Node.js to Java backend, developers will write 33% fewer lines of code and create 40% less files using Node.js over Java, documented here (https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-replacing-java-with-javascript-is-paying-off-for-paypal/)  by Jeff Harrell, ex-Director of Engineering and Chief Architect at Paypal. This data from Paypal’s backend won’t hold up against all products but you get the picture. Depending on your product, your tech stack can reduce iteration time greatly. 

As your customer base grows, your company will most likely start to create different product verticals to focus on specific customer groups. 

What does that mean?

That means, you’ll need to HIRE more engineers.

I know, I said a bad word. Hire

But as your company grows you’ll need to bring on more engineering talent. Your technology stack can either attract or repel talent from your company. Engineers are very picky people and tend to want to work on the latest and greatest technology stack at the time. Use this to your advantage when thinking long term. Also, keep in mind how hard it would be to onboard a new engineer that might not be as familiar with your technology stack.

Cost.

As an early stage company, keeping your expenses down is very important. Unsurprisingly, the cost to run your infrastructure will probably be your second line item after employee cost. The servers that keep your app running will need to run 24/7 and you will need some kind of redundancy. 

With that in mind, your cost can vary greatly depending on your technology. For example, if you were to build your application with a Microsoft technology stack. You would be required to pay a license fee for every server needed to run your application. Using open source technology can help keep your infrastructure price down. 

Another great example comes from LinkedIn (Social network for professionals). Back in 2013, LinkedIn built their application using a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. As an experiment, LinkedIn partially rebuilt their application in Node.js and was able to cut their number of servers from 30 to 3 while having enough bandwidth to handle 1000% more web traffic. LinkedIn was able to cut their cost by 90%.

I hope you’re starting to see the bigger picture.

Choosing the right technology stack for your company has large business implications on the future of your company. 

If you’re a technical member of your company, please comment below which stack you chose and why?

Not a technical member? Ask your CTO or lead engineer which stack your company runs on and why they chose it. 

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