I remember joining this startup sometime in 2024. They had only runway funds from investors and about 6 months to properly go to market and also raise a seed round.
I noticed a lot but let me highlight a few:
- first mistake, using AWS.. A $20/month Render, Railway, or Flyio would have handled their stack well at that stage
- fancy project management, using Jira and Clickup at the same time.. a free Notion or Google Sheet would have handled things well
- Slack paid tier, Figma org plan, paid Sentry
- Hiring very senior engineers too early, hiring multiple devops and cloud engineers.. hiring is very expensive and the seniors will always leave easily
Anyways in less than a year, they were out of business. Every dollar should either acquire a customer or build the thing customers want.
Everything else is overhead you're choosing to fund with runway or personal funds...
Young startups do not need a DevOps specialist.
A cracked senior or mid-level fullstack engineer can handle deployment, CI/CD, servers, monitoring, databases, and shipping the product.
Most startups are hiring for complexity they have not encountered yet.