Starting a business is already difficult enough and gets even more challenging due to the fast-paced environment, pressure from investors, etc. Many startups fail to succeed due to the mismanagement of complex operations and wrong technical choices.
Engineering is the most critical component of a tech startup. It demands short and medium-term productivity which is relative to the right way of building processes and systems. Tech-startups value engineers who are able to understand and are comfortable with the tricky coding. From chasing shiny tech to premature scaling, engineering mistakes can sink the whole company unless you know how to avoid it. In this blog, AVCOE takes you through some of the most common engineering mistakes that kill startups and which you should avoid.
Premature scaling
Scaling before reaching product-market fit is a waste of startup resources especially technological resources, and can be devastating to early startups, which often have little money and few engineers to deliver on huge feature requirements that require constant changes.
So, if premature scaling is so harmful to startups, why does it occur so often?
One of the reasons being, scaling seems like an easy growth opportunity for startups. Adding scaled technologies to address people’s needs makes processes look more exciting and attractive to engineers. This can be especially hindering startup engineers who want everything to be done at scale.
Anticipating and executing on those future needs before they arise may take valuable resources away from your immediate startup goal.
Using hyped technology
Using the latest technology can be a fatal engineering mistake. True, there’s nothing wrong with using the technology that’s latest in the market. But the mistake that startups make is chasing the hype over what’s really needed for your product. At the early stages, your main goal should be to deliver a viable product that fills consumers’ wants. Adopting the newest technologies means committing your startup’s scarce engineering resources to learn something new, instead of creating features that users will value. Working with the technology that you know and you can trust is the key to eliminating unnecessary technological uncertainties that can result in significant monetary loss.
Hiring the wrong engineers
When hiring a team of engineers it is important to ensure that they are not only a good fit for the business, but that they can actually adapt quickly and deliver the results in a given timeframe. For startups, time is a significant factor and the faster it can prove that its product is viable, the likelier its chances for survival. The market is saturated with engineers whose CVs sound promising, but what startups really need is high-quality fast work that will create a solid and stable foundation for the business to grow. Growing a startup is not a fancy job, the challenges often need instantaneous solutions that are not always pretty but ones that will work.
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