This. It took us three months to market back then, mostly because we skipped everything nonessential. Like, really everything. Sure, these days we have CI/CD with static checking, ChatOps, full observability, all the nice stuff that attracts good developers. But all of that is completely irrelevant to customers. It's just relevant to scaling a dev team.
The very first version we launched publically, we checked out, compiled and deployed through SSH directly on the servers. My first monitoring tool was htop in 3 screens plus some CloudWatch dashboards. A lot of credentials and endpoints were hardcoded. Not because we didn't know better, just to save time.
The number one thing pure techies completely get wrong is opportunity cost. Especially in the beginning, almost nothing beats time to market to validate product/market fit.
The very first version we launched publically, we checked out, compiled and deployed through SSH directly on the servers. My first monitoring tool was htop in 3 screens plus some CloudWatch dashboards. A lot of credentials and endpoints were hardcoded. Not because we didn't know better, just to save time.
The number one thing pure techies completely get wrong is opportunity cost. Especially in the beginning, almost nothing beats time to market to validate product/market fit.