DEV Community

Cover image for Stop Building for "Scale." You Don't Have Users Yet.

Stop Building for "Scale." You Don't Have Users Yet.

Shayan on September 04, 2025

I spent six months building the perfect architecture for my first project. Redis for caching, Kafka for events, multiple database replicas, load ba...
Collapse
 
giovannimazzuoccolo profile image
Giovanni Mazzuoccolo

I agree with 99.9% of what’s written in this article. The only point I disagree with is about error tracking. Adding a tool like Sentry takes just a few minutes to set up and can be useful from the very beginning.

For the rest, you can build the most beautiful and functional product, but without users, you have a Cathedral in the desert :)

Collapse
 
code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Every piece of infrastructure you add multiplies complexity

And most importantly availability! More components are usually not great for uptime :)

Collapse
 
shayy profile image
Shayan

Oh yeah! That's a really good point.

Collapse
 
lemii_ profile image
Lemmi

Love this, too many of us waste time scaling for users we don’t have.

Collapse
 
creator_x profile image
Xion Apex Academy

You are a legend thanks for the advice!

Collapse
 
pozda profile image
Ivan Pozderac

This article is so spot-on of what's wrong with startups and a lot of companies today. Maybe even mindset, we need to stop over-engineer things as a collective.


I just started side project with free postgres on neon, adonisjs for backend, astro+react on frontend.

That's it! That's the stack!

I think i will make starter template to use that stack on other side projects as well, setup is fast, easy and it works flawlessly. Scale? Ain't nobody got time for that!

Decided to separate repos to BE and FE for simpler versioning and separating releases. I was thinking about monorepo for about half an hour and decided that this separated setup would be simpler way of maintaining things, at least for me.

Collapse
 
fadhilsaheer profile image
Fadhil ⚡

This is one thing, I should've learned when I was starting out. None of my projects hit market. I had some users with a MVP, but for V1 I tried to make it scalable, and never got time to finish most of my side projects this way.

Collapse
 
garimasharma profile image
Garima

People need to hear this!
Why do you need a whole system designed with complexities before you even start working on it?

Collapse
 
slex1onemusdy profile image
Mustafa

Loved it. Well.... Someone had to say it :D

Collapse
 
vadim profile image
Vadim

We were ready for millions of users. We got 12.
Sad but true, many startups face that.

Collapse
 
baziota profile image
BaziotaBeans

Thanks for produce this article