• Frank Neff
• 12 Feb, 2025

• scaling
• strategy
• product
• architecture

The Scalability Trap: How Premature Technical Excellence Kills the Product

The “Build it right the first time” mantra has sunk more startups than bad code ever did.

I’ve seen it firsthand: One developer built his own message broker in PHP because ActiveMQ “didn’t fit his needs.” Another rebuilt Ansible in Perl to provision VMs. And the wildest one? Someone started designing a version control system on top of Elasticsearch because Git was “inefficient.”

These weren’t feats of brilliance. They were ego-driven distractions that added fragility, wasted money, and created zero customer value. And they all happened because leadership failed to ask the only question that matters: “How does this help the user?”

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