In the landscape of startups, technology stands out as an indispensable tool for innovation and growth. Why? Because of its ability to facilitate creation, to start from scratch – paraphrasing some developers, “nothing is impossible to program.” Moreover, the success of tech startups is grounded in their profitability and scalability.
Of course, such an attractive thing comes with challenges. For founders, the first question probably is: what technology to use when building my product? And many developers love to say, “It depends.” When choosing what stack you’re going to use, you must consider several things:
- Project requirements: What are the features of your product? Considering those features, what are the industry standards? For example, building a mobile app, you would choose mobile native languages.
- Costs: Costs of development and maintenance. These include human resources (IT team), timelines, hosting, licenses… Be honest about what needs to be prioritized. Of course, you always must look for ways to save money, but if you invest in something cheap (or very little development time), in the long term, it may lead to something called technical debt.
- Community: Check what documentation is available and other resources that will be helpful when you’re stuck fixing a bug!
- Scalability: This is about managing resources and the amount of work without compromising the performance of your product. For example: improving a server’s capacity, adding more database, having servers on demand… what technologies are out there that facilitate these tasks?
- Security: Somewhere to research about technology’s security is CVEdetails (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), where you can keep track of known security vulnerabilities.
- Training: With hundreds of technologies changing and emerging every day, it’s hard to keep track of all of them. Take into account that your IT team is going to take time, if not to learn, to perfect skills in these technologies.
Last but not least, remember: no stack is perfect, and your choice is also influenced by the product stage (it depends!). In Powertrain, we’re always looking for startups that have a CTO in their team – a full-time CTO can guide you in these decisions.
