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If your goal is to build a sustainable business you must address two questions: Will I provide value people are willing to pay for? Will I be able to find those

If your goal is to build a sustainable business you must address two questions: Will I provide value people are willing to pay for? Will I be able to find those people profitably? Both answers must be yes. You might be able to answer one of the questions without an MVP but very unlikely to answer both without. So you need to ship something. It would be clearly stupid to not consider your technology choices at all in the early stages. But the best decisions are usually the ones that allow you to determine the answers to both questions as soon as possible. Because if you aren’t able to eventually answer yes to both questions you will not build a sustainable business. If you are providing value, people are paying you and you can find customers, the technology sins from the past can be addressed. It might be really hard. But at least you’ll be working on something that matters. Spending a massive amount of time on getting it “just right” will most likely teach you that you’ve developed the perfect solution to a problem no one cares about. Speaking from experience of being involved with two acquisitions of companies I started (on the selling side) I can tell you that the “technology stack” discussion is a tiny footnote to the discussions on revenue, sales, customer lifetime value, etc.

mamcx 9y ago
>Spending a massive amount of time on getting it “just right” will most likely teach you that you’ve developed the perfect solution to a problem no one cares about. And this is the reason a RDBMS is totally better. You NOT need to "spend a massive amount of time". With this: 1- You get a totally proven and mature tech 2- With massive tolling support and documentation 3- With the capabilities to model even most NoSql structures. 4- With a query engine that will outperform most developers. And more flexible that most NoSql give 5- With enough scalability that you will ever need for your MVP and beyond 6- And with the ability to plug specialized storage like column stores, time stores and more without complicating your code duplicating efforts. --- P.D: I have been part of several projects that drink the NoSql koolaid, and be part of the weeks-long coding efforts that could be summarized as: "This could have been a one line sql code/or index ..." My last one, rebuilding core aspects of a RDBMS and still building features... dedicating large part of dev time is really "Spending a massive amount of time on getting it “just right”"
- davidgh 9y ago
  I was speaking less about the specific debate between NoSQL and RDBMS and more about being cautious to not over-think the technical aspects in general. Speaking specifically about NoSQL: I’ve been able to launch entire MVPs using DynamoDB, some Lambda functions and HTML / JavaScript in about the same amount of time it would have taken me to plan out, build and refactor a proper schema. And I usually learned through the MVPs that my idea was stupid and no one cared about what I built, much less about my choice of database.

mamcx 9y ago

>Spending a massive amount of time on getting it “just right” will most likely teach you that you’ve developed the perfect solution to a problem no one cares about. And this is the reason a RDBMS is totally better. You NOT need to "spend a massive amount of time". With this: 1- You get a totally proven and mature tech 2- With massive tolling support and documentation 3- With the capabilities to model even most NoSql structures. 4- With a query engine that will outperform most developers. And more flexible that most NoSql give 5- With enough scalability that you will ever need for your MVP and beyond 6- And with the ability to plug specialized storage like column stores, time stores and more without complicating your code duplicating efforts. --- P.D: I have been part of several projects that drink the NoSql koolaid, and be part of the weeks-long coding efforts that could be summarized as: "This could have been a one line sql code/or index ..." My last one, rebuilding core aspects of a RDBMS and still building features... dedicating large part of dev time is really "Spending a massive amount of time on getting it “just right”"

davidgh 9y ago
I was speaking less about the specific debate between NoSQL and RDBMS and more about being cautious to not over-think the technical aspects in general. Speaking specifically about NoSQL: I’ve been able to launch entire MVPs using DynamoDB, some Lambda functions and HTML / JavaScript in about the same amount of time it would have taken me to plan out, build and refactor a proper schema. And I usually learned through the MVPs that my idea was stupid and no one cared about what I built, much less about my choice of database.