Build the Right Tech Before It Gets Expensive

A founder messaged me a few months back asking if their architecture was "ready to scale." They had 40 users. I asked what they meant by scale, and it turned out someone on their team had read a blog post about how a unicorn handles millions of requests, and they'd spent three weeks building toward that instead of toward their next 40 users.

That's the pattern I keep running into across the teams my team at Utkal Labs works with — EdTech, eSports, PropTech, marketplaces, it doesn't matter the domain. The failure isn't usually moving too fast. It's solving a problem you don't have yet.

Two ways this goes wrong

The first is premature scale. Microservices before there's a second engineer to own the second service. Kubernetes before there's traffic that needs it. Every one of these decisions is defensible on its own — together, they turn a 2-week feature into a 2-month one, for a product that hasn't found product-market fit.

The second is premature shortcuts, and it's sneakier because it looks like speed at first. Hardcoded logic where a config value should live. No tests "for now." A schema that fit the first customer and breaks for the fifth. It doesn't announce itself — it just makes every future change slower than the last, until a team is spending more time fighting the codebase than shipping.

The question that actually matters

Not "how do we build this well" — but "what does this stage of the company need from its tech." A pre-seed product needs to be changeable, not scalable. A Series A product with real usage needs some of both. What's right at 10 users is often wrong at 10,000 — and that's fine. The mistake is building for 10,000 when you have 10, or refusing to grow up once you actually have 10,000.

This is what I try to bring into every engagement: not the best architecture in the abstract, but the right one for where a company actually is, that won't fight them where they're headed next.