Stop building scalable code.

Startups should move fast.

Early stage startups should move fast and I mean fast. I always see engineers trying to build scalable and beautiful code making sure their next engineer understands their sexy documentation. Fact is, there won’t be any “next engineer” unless you get that feature shipped asap.

Ship features not code

In early stage, you are coding for the users not for your peers. If the team is composed of more than one engineer, make sure every engineer are building a part of the application which are not conflicting (think front-end, back-end) so the developer only needs to understand his own part of the code.

Get the shit done

Stop wasting too much time on DRY components, stop the premature optimization, stop documenting methods, and get that shit done and shipped.

The faster the company moves the more feedback you can iterate on a shorter time. The moment you reach enough users that you actually need to start scaling but don’t have scaling code, then give a pat on your back. 1/10 startups fail to reach that stage because they were wasting time building code for the team instead of building code for the client. At that point you should have enough funds and time to build scalable and maintainable code for the future.