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Innovation

Startup: a hypothetical scenario

Picture yourself in the following situation. You’ve come up with what you think is a cool idea for a so-called web 2.0 site. Furthermore, you’ve managed to convince some VC types to invest some (pre-)seed funding – enough to develop a public beta. You developed a quick and dirty proof-of-concept to show the VCs, but now it has to be thrown away. You have to start development on the real thing from scratch.

The question is, what technologies, programming languages, tools and platforms are you going to use to implement your idea? Language-wise, do you go for Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, or something else? If you take the PHP route, how do you ensure maintainability in the long term? If decide on Java, do you use JSP, Velocity or Freemarker? Would you use Struts or Spring? Do you need any of these frameworks at all? Do you run on Linux, Free BSD, Windows or Mac OS X Server? Why?

To make this question at least partly answerable, imagine for the moment we’re just considering the presentation tier, and not any of the back end magic. Also imagine that what you’re developing is similar to one of today’s social networking sites (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace or something), and that visualisations (e.g., of directed graphs) might need to be generated dynamically from data in the back end. You can assume that the beta version will have a small number of types of dynamically generated pages (less than 10, say) but later versions will end up with many more.

Answers along the lines of “It’s much of a muchness, so I would choose X, Y and Z because they’re what I know”, “I’d choose X, Y and Z because the newly graduated computer science students I’d have to hire are most likely to be comfortable with those” and “X, Y and Z are nice but too expensive for my startup, so I’d choose A, B and C instead” are completely acceptable.

I’ve already got some great input from my closest friends (at least the programmers among them), but I’d like to get some responses from a wider audience. I’m hoping some ex-DSTC engineers/researchers might have an opinion on this; you don’t need to have worked at a startup to give useful feedback!

I’m asking this question out of pure curiosity, nothing more, and I have my own feelings on this (represented by the sample answers above). Please leave your answer as a comment below.

By ricky

Husband, dad, R&D manager and resident Lean Startup evangelist. I work at NICTA.

6 replies on “Startup: a hypothetical scenario”

Hi Ricky,

didn’t actually see the original post in my rss reader until today, could be your site or bloglines.

Thing is, there are big sites being run on all combinations of your options. If you just need *something*, write it in what you feel comfortable in, if it needs to scale later you can use your first iteration as a learning experience.

Personally, I think you’d be crazy to write anything in java, you can’t be nimble in java. I also think php is a dead end, it’s just too bodgy.

Python/Ruby is the only way to go imho.

Funnily enough I saw no mention of javascript for your web 2.0 site :) I would suggest that none of the backend stuff matters at all, and that the only thing that matters is which javascript library you use in the front end.

I assume that this is for a “friend” :-). But I shouldn’t assume.

I’m afraid to say I can’t add that much. Just don’t have the knowledge.

For this kind of thing, being able to easily tinker with and evolve the system seems an important critiera, if just one of the relevant criteria.

James.

a few thoughts:

it doesn’t matter what technology you use, because you’ll rewrite the whole thing several times anyway. pick what’s fastest to explore the idea and the market now.

time to market, and reaction time once you’re there, cost far more than another 100 servers while you’re in the early stage.

who are your partners (or your VC’s partners)? do they have an affinity with any particular technology?

what are your friends best at? you’ll need a pool of expertise (and employees), so choose something to maximise that opportunity.

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