Copyright Inc. Magazine
At least thats the case for most startups, according to an auditor of 47 failed startups who posted about his experience on Reddit’s r/Entrepreneur thread. “I’ve been doing this for about 3 years now,” Meir Avimelec Davidov, Founder & CEO of Gliltech Software and author of the Reddit post said. “Startups bring me in when shit hits the fan—not the ‘we ran out of money’ fan, the ‘our product literally cannot scale and we have no idea why’ fan.” Davidov found that failed startups often follow a similar timeline in relation to their codebases. The first six months, business seems to be working well; the next six see founders facing bugs with a “we’ll fix it later” mentality. From month 13 to 18, adding new features becomes stressful as doing so often breaks previous ones. By month 19, more engineers are hired to maintain the app, but nothing new is built. At the 25 month mark, startups either die or start over from scratch. Davidov found this is due to inadequate codebase etiquette. For instance, he says that 89 percent of startups he audited did not index their codebase, significantly slowing site or product functionality. Additionally, 68 percent of codebases had security vulnerabilities, and 91 percent had no automated testing, making adding new features unpredictable. And in terms of infrastructure, Davidov found that startup founders are often overpaying for servers, with 76 percent using infrastructure inefficiently. “The average is 13 percent utilization—you’re paying for 100 servers and using 13 of them. Burning $3k-15k a month for nothing,” he says. Keeping your startup from sinking According to the thread, it is all about architecture, and just two weeks focusing on building before coding could “save you 18 months of hell.” By automating tests from the start, and thinking at scale before reaching those numbers, founders can proactively prevent major crashes. While boring and unsexy work, taking care of the code’s architecture on week one, rather than year one, will prevent future engineering hires from building on quicksand.
