tech-company, startup-costs, website, beta-testingSupposing an entrepreneur building an innovative web application.
According to Lean Startup philosophy, user feedback is the key for the accounting.
My question is pretty simple and focused on technical aspect:
Assuming that the MVP is published with the minimal features and minimal effort regarding technologies, isn’t it really bad for the team to notice a huge failure regarding scalability?
What if the MVP has such a success that more than 5 millions of users connect and use the application at the same time ? And the app just crashes…
Should the MVP be targeted on a pretty small audience?
What is worse for the startup:
To have a bad reputation due to this lack of scalability, but on the other hand, to have received useful user feedbacks?
Or should I focus some months on scalability (thus delaying the user feedback step), and then push the MVP online?
You have no idea if your MVP is going to achieve product-market fit until you launch it. You should always launch it first without worrying about scalability. No matter how sure you are about the product, the market will always give you feedback you weren’t expecting. Focus on responding to that instead of scalability that might never be necessary. The market has patience for scalability issues – see Twitter as a great example.
Your problem isn’t, “what if interest is overwhelming?” but “how do I get people interested?”
If you think about your question in resource terms, it boils down to, “how much weight should I give to designing, maintaining and assuring technical scalability when scheduling activities?”
You could give it zero priority. But I see a lot of startups whose idea only works at scale, and who aren’t even glancing at the fact that the computing power and storage they need is (say) proportional to the user base squared, to achieve the cool thing they’re doing.
You could give it top priority. But then every time you want to experiment or pivot, you have a major lag between intent and action: you bought buildings insurance cover for a house when all you have is a bare plot, and every time you tweak the architect’s plans, you have to wait a week for the insurance review.
For most startups, scalability should be a low priority until you have evidenced strong growth. It’s not zero: put aside a little time to ask, what’s going to break when we go from ten to ten thousand users?
Most successful startups have had major re-engineering to do along the way. That’s not because they were too dumb to look ahead, it’s because they were too smart to ever imagine that the future would play out the way it looked day one.
While I think Jeremys answer is the best of the 2 options above, the decision does depend on startup industry too. Technical startups might be tempted to put more resources into a more architected approach, but without business viability it is time generally wasted. Google Cloud Platform provides options to scale deployment, development, and operations … without needing to spend time too early in the startup process.
Startup success is only partially a great idea. Great business decisions are critical.
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