Bad tech stack won’t kill a startup. But the right one will accelerate it.
Selection Rules¶
- Development speed > performance (in early stage)
- Choose based on developer availability
- Boring technology = fewer bugs
- Fewer technologies = less complexity
- Cloud-agnostic if possible
Recommended Stacks¶
Solo founder / small team¶
- Next.js + Vercel + Supabase
- Rails + Heroku
- Django + Railway
Startup (5-20 people)¶
- TypeScript (frontend + backend)
- PostgreSQL
- Docker + K8s (gradually)
- GitHub Actions CI/CD
Scale-up (20+ people)¶
- Microservices (gradually, not from start!)
- Go/Rust for performance-critical services
- Kafka for event streaming
- Terraform for IaC
Anti-patterns¶
- Microservices from day 1
- “We’ll write our own framework”
- Exotic language (hiring nightmare)
- Premature optimization
- Vendor lock-in
Rule¶
The best tech stack is the one your team can ship fast with. In early stage, speed is everything.
startuptech stackarchitecture