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I’ve seen many founders and creative teams struggle around the right approach for building an initial product. I’ve experienced this situation myself as a founder of Telos Labs and also previously–having led the creation of tens of digital products, some re-builds and migrations, as well as changes in technical architecture.
Often, the cacophony of promoted tech solutions makes the options more nebulous and harder to unravel. The tech media landscape tends to focus its promotion around topics that may be exciting to read and consider, but frequently are either irrelevant or actually counterproductive from the point of view of building a new product effectively and maximizing the probability of business viability and success. Having a clear way to navigate will help you on your journey as the voyage becomes more turbulent.
(Created with Accomplice.ai)
So here are a few considerations that can help you on your journey whether it is building a new product, considering a rebuild due to development velocity challenges, or extending an existing digital ecosystem.
Key considerations for building a digital product
When considering the technology for a new venture or a distinct web app project within an existing company, I recommend you take into account three key strategic elements, in this order or priority:
- Development speed: If speed to first release and iterations are too low, the company will likely never achieve product-market fit. Simply put, the number of experiments for a given budget runway will be too low for likely success. This holds true for a new digital product within an existing company, or for a non-profit which has secured funds to create a digital experience. Development speed will enable greater chance of profitability, which will reduce the risk the company has to terminate the investment. In the case of a non-profit, development speed will enable the organization to show funders quicker results.
- Sustainability: Once the business has found product market-fit, it requires years of competent enhancement at reasonable speed and cost to keep both customers and investors happy. Or, if bootstrapped, to build and maintain profitability. This requires sustainable software-development practices that manage technical debt and use astute architectures. Minimizing total cost of ownership for a given threshold of company success will maximize opportunities and outcomes for founders, investors and team members.
- Performance: Most early-stage companies tend to have a relatively inexperienced technology leaders. This sometimes can lead to an exaggerated focus on performance attributes like page load speed and memory use. Focusing on these over development speed and sustainability is a mistake, except for the relatively few opportunities where such performance makes or breaks a business opportunity. Nevertheless, this is still worth considering, in distant third place for most web applications.
Let us discuss two key maxims in developing a new custom software solution for a new business venture or startup and how they help avoid common pitfalls.
Do not optimize prematurely
The tech culture is at least partly anchored in computer science, whose main approach is computational thinking. Computational thinking teaches people to subdivide the problem and fragment. While this approach is well-suited to addressing problems that otherwise seem intimidating or intractable, it often leads people to either prematurely optimize or over-complicate their solutions. This is because they are less likely to see intrinsic overlap or connections between the components of their analysis. They also often ignore the operational or human consequences of maintaining code in the medium to long-term.
One example of this is in splitting a web app into separate back-end/API and front-end applications. This is a very common, and perhaps even the dominant pattern. Yet it is possible to maintain separation of concerns - the usual objective - while retaining a single application monolith. This avoids the extra complexity of managing multiple applications. It is not only possible: at Telos, we recommend it as a default approach using technologies like StimulusJS or Hotwire, where HTML is sent over the wire.
If and when specific performance attributes become important because clients or customers explicitly ask for these, this is your technical team’s moment to shine. But they should do so by being strategic and thoughtful to prioritize development speed and sustainability. So there is a moment for optimization, it is just rarely at the beginning and never on a whim or exaggerated sense of the importance of computational wizardry.
Standard web app development is not a novel problem. So most companies and founders would do well to consider the integrated frameworks that have built infrastructure to provide value against these three imperatives.
But mine isn’t “standard” web development, you say? Well it can probably be separated into the 80% that is and the 20% that is not. The simpler you make the larger portion, the faster and more innovative you’ll be able to make the unique part. So you should prefer standard and simple approaches.
Avoid the hype
Another pitfall of development exists when teams are too swayed by the marketing behind specific technologies. The hype is strongest around JavaScript frameworks, blockchain-based web applications, and perhaps also artificial intelligence (AI).
Let’s discuss how.
The need for a programming language at the creation of the web browser and the explosion of interest in web development has made JavaScript necessary. Yet the mirage of an optimal web architecture relying on a single programming language has convinced certain development communities to embrace the idea of having a server programmed in JavaScript and a separate front-end app also in JavaScript.
The idea is that this would deliver some mystical efficiency in the re-use of classes or functions. This is rarely if ever the case. Instead, one is forced to resolve relatively low-level problems without clear standards or conventions while both the JavaScript tooling and approaches shift with every new fad. This is precious time wasted from the perspective of the business.
The battle for the meaning of Web3 continues, with blockchain enthusiasts being the dominant voices at present. But caveat emptor! There are many scams and get-rich schemes in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. It is difficult to trust any advocates when caught in a speculative craze.
From where I stand, there isn’t a real value-creating use case for any of these blockchain technologies when building web applications outside of ideological commitments. Use a database if you are interested in functional value.
The Telos way
Pick the right value-integrated ecosystem for your business or their combination. The benefit of a value-integrated ecosystem is a diverse ecology of vendors, proven and battle-tested tools, and know-how borne from decades of experience. By borrowing ecosystem standards, you significantly leap ahead instead of where you would be starting from scratch.
Then you can focus your technical team’s time on innovating the layer that is unique to you. So by being strategic in what you build, and using other technologies as a platform, you maximize your probability of success.
A few examples of well established integrated ecosystems to consider:
- An ecommerce-based business should heavily consider platforms like Shopify rather than custom building a solution for online retail sales
- Business owners looking to set up a blog for content marketing should heavily consider Wordpress or other Content Management Systems, over a custom build for managing content
- Companies looking for a simple (mostly) static site to showcase their work or give them a web-presence should consider specialized landing page platforms like Squarespace or Webflow .
- Many custom development teams would do well to pick a platform as a service for managing their deployments and infrastructure in the cloud, such as Render or Fly . Unless you are creating an AWS competitor, your company will not likely succeed based on managing a complex infrastructure setup directly.
- If you are unable to sustain a custom development tool, but are willing to put in the time directly to build something for a few months, consider no-code solutions like Bubble .
If a custom build is required, a value-integrated framework like Ruby on Rails makes a great deal of sense and is our recommended tool. It will deliver excellent development speed, sustainability and (in the right hands) performance. With clear conventions, a high-level programming language, and a diversity of open source tools (Ruby calls them gems), Ruby on Rails applications have been the choice for many of the world’s leading startups founded after Ruby on Rails was around. For example: Airbnb, Twitter, Shopify, Gusto, Zendesk, and more.
(Created with Accomplice.ai)
Are you considering approaches for a web application requiring custom development at your company, or for launching your digital product? Contact us for inquiries. We are thoughtful about where we can help and how to be as effective as possible with your level of resourcing.
Thanks to Alicia Rojas and Roby Arriaga for their comments and edits.
