Selecting Tech Stack for Your Startup Product

Let's try to tackle the technology problem with a tiny case study. Last Fall, Smartup Network was going through the same problem faced with the issue of choosing a frontend development technology for the brand new product Bizim Tarifler that we were building for Yıldız Ventures.

Selecting your development technology is always ciritical whether you are building a muti-million dollar banking software or just building an MVP to test your entrepreneurship hypothesis. Why? 

• It affects what kind of development tools you will be using in the future since every technical decision you take will have to be in line with your tech stack.
• It determines whether adding new members to your development team will be easy-breezy or give you nightmares because the supply of developers in your community that have experience in the technology you have used to build your product will be the determining factor.
• It will either boost the motivation of your developers or kill it generally depending wheter you are using new technology or not. Most of the time, your fellow teammates, to be more precise, startup developers  want to use new technology, in fact this is the main reason they are in a startup and not in an enterprise environment. You can pay them %25 more and still it would not be as valuable to them as their freedom to decide which development framework you will be using.

It is always tricky when it comes to frontend web frameworks because unlike the more static backend world, a new popular frontend framework emerges literally every other three months. Bad news is that someone from your development will want to use it:) In our case the new hotshot was the Vue.JS framework. At Smartup Network, we have development standards to have smooth developer transitions between two products and using the React.JS framework was a standard we enjoyed, untill it was threatened by the tempting lines of Vue.JS.  

Why am I speaking of new frameworks as if they were serial killers? As tempting as they may be to a technical person, using an established technology is most often safer simply because it has been used for a longer time period, technical problems have been fixed and published so your fellow developer teammates can google it, there are more libraries available so the possibility of not being able to implement a feature is considerably lower. Is it always faster? No. Does it always produce higher quality features? No.  Does it always produce more easily maintained code? No. Developers want to use it for a reason.

So what you should do is assess each of these matters seperately and choose the most cost effective option in the long run. If you choose to use new technology, make sure that its popularity is not decreasing among developer communities and it will be around next year:) We ended up going through with our development team's suggestion, namely Vue.JS framework and the determining factor for us was its popularity was increasing rapidly and we guessed we would easily be able to recruit new developers who want to develop in Vue.JS into our team. It turned out to be the correct choice since today Vue is almost as popular as React!