I was chatting over beer with an early stage founder – the slide deck and dream sort of early.
“I want to make sure this first version is built to last,” they said.
“You’re just going to throw it away in a year or two,” is more or less my reply at the time.
And I stand by that.
The first version of your startup’s software can be best thought of as garbage – cheap, disposable goods that you won’t be carrying with you later.
This mindset can feel like a waste, but I’d argue it is not because the currency of an early stage startup is knowledge, in figuring out if your idea is worth anything to the market.
And you will probably be wrong.
Anything you invest into figuring that out – and what the right thing is – is the waste.
Another wrinkle: as software engineering organizations grow, the pressure of the rewrite grows.
Every software company I’ve ever worked at eventually did the big rewrite.
I have a client right now that literally pasted their v2 on top of the v1 in the same codebase.
I have another connection that recently hired a new Chief Technical Officer – a big hire for their growing startup. Unsurprisingly, the first thing that new engineering leader did was kick off the Big Rewrite Project.
Anytime a software organization grows beyond the original team, this pressure grows. If you roll over an entire team – like when building your v1 with contract resources – the rewrite is inevitable.
Because software is difficult to understand. And understanding code other people wrote is among the hardest bits of software engineering.
Most “technical debt” is “other people’s code” at its heart.
So, for that founder at the top – embarking on their very first steps – think through what is the cheapest, stupidest way you can start gaining knowledge.
Use AI tools, use Google Sheets and Bubble and WordPress and Airtable.
Anything you build that early will be thrown away later.
Either because you discover a different path and pivot or perish, or you’re wildly successful and hire software engineers and engineering leadership who insist on rewriting it anyway.
It wasn’t meant to last.
It’s for right now.
Go get it out there.