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Tech Stack for “Failing Fast”

3 points by AndrewSChapman ↗ HN
Hey Hacker News, in light of recent posts about failed business ideas, I'm curious about "failing fast".

For start-up companies, "failing fast" is critical to avoid spending loads of money on a dead-end.

What technologies do you consider are the best-of-breed to deliver the fastest possible prototyping? Consider the whole tech stack: database, back-end, server,front-end (web), mobile apps etc.

Thank you!

9 comments

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_0o6v
Laravel (and ecosystem). Basically does everything including billing etc.
brudgers
The fastest way to fail fast is likely to be just building it using tools at hand and seeing what happens.

Time spent optimizing a tech stack probably delays fast failure unnecessarily because you don't know whether it will fail and how until the experiment happens.

The time to try something different is after failure not before.

eswat
When I used to build MVPs for clients I stuck to Ruby on Rails, even though I mostly worked with Python and/or JavaScript on mature products.

Fast to get features usable – as in deciding whether this should be developed further or not based on customer feedback – quickly and the "convention over configuration" aspect makes handover easy.

muzani
[Non-scalable stack]

DB: Google Sheets

API: Sheety

Web: Ionic/Framework7

App: Cordova with above

Built and tested with hundreds of daily users, but will be expensive to scale and probably has to replaced at some point.

[Solo-scalable]

Back end/DB: Parse Server + MongoDB Atlas + Heroku. No API needed.

Web: jQuery

App: whatever you know

Built and sold one company with this stack, and done some low budget contracts with this. A little more expensive and buggy to start with, but easy to scale to over a thousand daily users.

muzani
Also while bootstrap seems to save a little time, I couldn't really recommend it these days.
snicker7
The tech stack you already know is best. Rails might be great, but not if you don't already know Ruby or Rails.

That said: avoid "JAM stack". Use a fullstack "batteries including" framework with good documentation and a template project.

muzani
What is wrong with Jamstack?