Don't code fancy when business is starting.

Startups fail for many reasons. Running out of money. Bad timing. No market fit.

But there's a quieter killer: over-engineering.

I've watched teams burn months building "scalable" architectures for products with zero users. Microservices for apps that could be a monolith. Kubernetes clusters for traffic that could run on a single server.

It's what you know the best that will help you surf across the waves.

When the business is starting, your job isn't to experiment with trendy technologies. It's to validate ideas as fast as possible. Every hour spent learning a new framework is an hour not spent talking to customers.

Use boring technology. Use what you know. Ship fast.

There's a time for technical exploration. That time is after you've found product-market fit. After you have revenue. After you've earned the right to think about scale.

Until then, fancy code is a liability. It slows you down. It creates complexity. It distracts from the only thing that matters: finding something people want.

The graveyard of startups is filled with beautiful codebases that nobody ever used.

Don't let yours be one of them.