In the early days of a startup, founders may think they have all the answers. Chasing growth at breakneck speed, armed with all the confidence in the world, every founder knows this feeling all too well. 

In the meantime we know that 90% of startups fail, and often the autopsy reads the same: they were built too fast, without a strong foundation.

Founders are often so focused on fundraising, hiring, and marketing that they underestimate the importance of related critical decisions. The wrong call can finish your startup before its journey begins. So, as a founder, how do you make the mostly right decisions? 

Here’s a checklist of critical technical decisions to help you avoid costly mistakes and lay the groundwork for success.

1. Choose Scalable Cloud Infrastructure From Day 1

When founders launch their first launched startup, they often try to cut costs by cloud hosting on a smaller, cheaper, niche provider.

It is usually fine — until it isn’t.

The moment user base doubles, outages start taking weeks to resolve. Switching to AWS solves the problem, but the migration can eat up months of engineering founders don't have.

Scalable AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure infrastructure is for ambitious companies. It might be even affordable if you know how to approach it. Start with pay-as-you-go plans and reserve instances strategically. Design your architecture to minimize reliance on provider-specific services.

2. Make Technical Debt Management Your Priority 

The excitement of rapid development often carries a hidden danger: technical debt.

Technical debt isn’t inherently bad as we used to think. In fact, some debt is okay when traded for speed in the early days. The danger is letting it pile up without a plan to pay it down.

To keep a middle ground you need to:

  • Create a "technical debt log" literally from day one. Every time you skip a best practice or hack together a quick fix, document it. Otherwise, "quick fixes" will turn into a patchwork of brittle systems that slow everything down.
  • Allocate 20% of your development cycles to refactoring or debt repayment. This habit ensures you’re growing your tech-enabled business sustainably.

3. Use Open-Source Tools, But Know What You’re Signing Up For

Open-source software can be a startup’s best friend or its Achilles’ heel. Kubernetes and React have fueled innovation for countless companies, offering powerful solutions without hefty price tags. But integrating an open-source tool without proper vetting can lead to security vulnerabilities or a lack of support.

Therefore, vet your options thoroughly. Before opting for open-source, ask yourself the following:

  • Is the project actively maintained? 
  • Does it have a large, active community?
  • Do you have the bandwidth to manage it?

If the answer to any of these is "no," think twice.

4. Set Up CI/CD Pipelines to Avoid Deployment Nightmares

In 2012, Knight Capital lost USD 440 million in 30 minutes due to a deployment mistake. A bug caused the software to execute faulty trades at high volume. It's a great example on how apps gain traction, but one bad deployment tanks your user experience forever.

This scenario is avoidable with CI/CD pipelines. By automating builds, tests, and deployments, you can minimize human error and speed up development.

Take inspiration from companies like Spotify, which reduced bugs and sped up releases with a robust CI/CD setup. Don’t wait for disaster to implement this.

👉 Founder’s Tip: Start small with tools like GitHub Actions. Even a basic pipeline will save you more time than you think.

5. Bake Data Security and Compliance Into Your Stack

Founders usually assume security and compliance are things they’d figure out “later.” But it will change when a potential enterprise client walks away because you didn’t meet compliance requirements. And it's not the worst thing.

During 2018-2024, the average GDPR fine was EUR 2,142,712 across all countries. For breaching CCPA penalties can range from USD 2,663 to USD 7,988.

Obviously, as a startup, regulatory non-compliance is a death sentence. But you shouldn't treat compliance as a checklist. Weave it into your development process.

Use encryption, audit logs, and secure authentication from the beginning. Work with legal counsel to understand regional laws like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA. And remember that building trust with users starts with securing their data.

6. Balance MVP Speed With Long-Term Growth

In the early days, you need to get your MVP into users’ hands as fast as possible to validate an idea, impress your investors, etc. But what if "quick and dirty" MVP meets 2x traffic spikes overnight? Your backend will be collapsed, and your team will spend months rebuilding instead of iterating on features.

What should you do to avoid it:

  • Use frameworks like Django or Node.js, which balance rapid prototyping with scalability.
  • Build modularly so you can upgrade components without redoing the entire system.

👉 Founder’s Tip: Your MVP is a tent. It doesn’t need to be a mansion, but it should withstand a few storms.

7. Adopt Modular Architecture for Agility

Most startups prefer to start with monolithic architecture, because it seems simpler. A small team of 3-5 developers can build an MVP in Ruby on Rails or Django in weeks rather than months, without needing to worry about microservice boundaries or infrastructure complexities.

So, why do some unicorns, like Uber, opt for modular and microservices architectures early on? Because they think about scalability as well. Moving to modular services right from the start gives startups the freedom to experiment and scale without breaking the system.  

But don’t go all-in on microservices too early. Start with modularity and move to microservices as you grow.

8. Track Key Technical Metrics Religiously

Stop being obsessed with signups or similar metrics. This oversight will come back to haunt you, for example, during a critical client demo when your app crashes mid-presentation.

Instead of tracking uptime, response time, and error rates, you’re flying blind. They are your early warning system, letting you address issues before they snowball into outages.

  • Set up dashboards with Datadog or New Relic.
  • Share metrics across your team as it fosters accountability.

Uptime matters more than user counts. If your app doesn’t work, the users won’t stay.

9. Document Everything 

Insufficient documentation is the second friction point making developers lose up to 8 hours per week. At least, 41% of responded engineers admitted it.

You might not feel documentation urgent today, but it will be when your team doubles in size. Try to onboard an engineer when nothing is documented. You’ll waste weeks explaining code and systems that could’ve been summarized in a few docs.

Focus on documentation, but don’t overthink it, because good documentation doesn’t need to be exhaustive. Describe key areas like system architecture, code conventions, and troubleshooting FAQs.

10. Hire for Culture and Capability

The best hire you can make isn't the most talented engineer. It can be someone who can adapt, collaborate, and solve problems under pressure. The case is a brilliant developer who disrupts team dynamics can do more harm than good.

Hard skills are like product quality, they should be non-negotiable in any case. You should assess your ability to collaborate, adapt, and contribute to your mission. During interviews, ask open-ended questions, like, "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate. How did you resolve it?" The answer will reveal whether a candidate is a team player or a solo act.

Most likely, you can't do this all alone, especially when needing to hire multiple specialists. So make sure you have at least one experienced recruiter & HR to have another opinion.

Wrapping Up

Every decision you make as a founder ripples through your startup’s future. But indecision can cost you even more — time, resources, and, sometimes, the chance to stay ahead of the competition.

There’s no such thing as a perfect decision. What separates successful founders isn’t avoiding mistakes, it’s learning from them and adapting quickly.

So, move step-by-step. Choose one area, whether it’s managing technical debt, refining your infrastructure, or improving your deployment process, and take action. Your ability to move forward decisively, even in uncertainty, is what will define your startup’s success.

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