1. Because we knew it well, it stayed out of the way. We usually knew how to accomplish what we needed to.
2. We enjoyed using it. Work didn’t feel as much like, er, work, and we did it more.
Our stack may or may not have been the best, but even if it was, objective quality wasn’t what made the difference.
To use an analogy, imagine a painter who knows their current paints and brushes very well. We used good supplies that we knew and liked, even when they weren’t the one that the art store was marketing. Our goal was to finish a painting (MVP), not re-learn how to obtain the texture we want with “the best” brushes.
For a typical small business or tiny new startup, I’d use whichever modern stack let the team work most efficiently (including hiring/staffing, if that’s in the plan). The difference between “any great modern stack” and “the best stack” is smaller than the gain from the 2 benefits above.
(Tiny nit: rather than “ROI,” I think the term you want is enterprise value, revenue, or profit)
I originally started the server component using procedural PHP on $5/month shared hosting, which ground to a halt after receiving local news exposure. As users grew, I slowly built up the server stack to be more robust, tested, etc. For the most part, my users were okay with these growing pains (certain parts of the service had downtime as it expanded and grew) and they did not impact the overall success of the app.
When starting a new product, my biggest focus would be to put together the stack in a way which allows for the ability to expand, pivot, and change to account for unforeseen events. I feel that in a lot of cases, too much time is wasted debating tech stack factors which ultimately do not matter.
Going back to laravel/vue again. Just wanted to confirm my suspicions. I think I'm sticking to what works even though how outdated or ugly it is.
Frankly this is making me more money than my salary on average and did really change my life and the ROI is astronomical compared to the monthly costs of few VPS + some money for data...
Everything is working on autopilot and I am free to do whatever I like with my time...
Of course they all failed (no one in the right mind will publish a good trading strategy period), but understand why and how I did came up with my own ideas...
By gaining experience you will start to come up with your own ideas to test... and this is how I found my edge in the market...
Thanks in advance.
We couldn't get funding, so it was important that we could build things very fast with limited resources. I also made the mistake of being a technical CEO, so dev time was very limited as I had to deal with multiple distractions from logistics to finance.
For acquisition, the tech stack was also one of the factors in the final valuation. Nobody wants to acquire something they can't maintain (although ironically this was what happened exactly).
... I suspect I'm an outlier here though, vast majority of the time the customer and the problem being solved doesn't care about the tech