I've noticed it's common for first time founders to fall into the trap of over-investing in hypothetical future problems. Questions like, "How much will this BaaS (Backend as a Service) cost when we have a million users?" seem to consume more focus than "How do we get (and keep) our first 100 users?". At Vygo, I was the sole technical founder and only engineer for many years. By keeping our technical overhead low and choosing services and frameworks that simplified my workload instead of trying to manage everything myself, we were able to overcome many challenges and grow with an extremely lean team. While planning for scalability is important, spending too much of your limited capacity solving for potential future scenarios can be counterproductive early on. Building a sustainable company with a small team and the ability to iterate quickly to support your customers is key. A manageable foundation will help to ensure your company reaches the stage where these "good problems to have" can now be solved.
Scalability is a luxury problem. 🙃
Keen to know more about Vygo in the early days! How did you decide what and how to build right at the beginning? What did v1 actually look like?
This is embarrassingly relatable and so true— I laugh at how much time we spent forecasting our hypothetical revenue to show hockey stick growth on a pitch deck 😅
I'm more inclined to ask "how can I avoid painting myself into a corner?" I provide on-prem email infrastructure and the number of SendGrid users who now need to build a pile of functionality to leave SendGrid is concerning, but could have been partially averted by not depending so much on SendGrid. I'd never tell someone to send their email on-prem on day one, but limiting their SaaS use to SMTP relay only without fully entrenching their APIs saves a world of pain down the road, even if there is more money to deal with it later.
Absolutely true! Focusing on immediate user acquisition and refining your product early on can pave the way for sustainable growth. Simplifying operations and staying agile were key in scaling efficiently.
Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Vygo
3wLove this! Geez it’s easy to get distracted and focus on the wrong stuff early on. I feel like half my job now is just trying to make sure we don’t get distracted by issues that don’t end up mattering 😂