0 to 1 is the hardest
Far too often, software is optimized prematurely. We have lots of cute phrases to warn developers of this tendency: “YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It)”, “KISS (Keep it simple, Stupid)”, etc.
Yet, in my personal bubble (meticulously selected via the omnipotent Twitter Algorithm™) I still marvel at the number of devs who imagine themselves immune to these warnings.
I call it “Engineering Porn”.
The gist is simple: Engineers love to imagine they’re solving harder problems than they really are. Some seem terrified that they’ll get bored. Others imagine they’ll accidentally create a product that isn't ready to scale to millions of concurrent users. (If you find yourself doing this often, please let me invest.)
Whatever the reasoning, we sacrifice pragmatism in exchange for “scalability” to meet problems that don’t exist and support customers we do not have.
A profitable business must nail 0 → 1 first. The odds that you’ll succeed long enough to concern yourself with 10 → 100 are very scarce. If you do beat the odds, you’ve got real-world data to inform how you’ll pivot to solve your scalability problem.
Don’t worry about 10 → 100. Focus on nailing 0 → 1.