The scale fallacy

After nearly 30 years developing software from startups to established companies, I’ve watched the same story play out repeatedly.

A young company gets some funding. Developers arrive eager to build something amazing. Then someone utters those fatal words: “We need to build for scalability.”

This is where bias and intuition clash in dangerous ways.

The intuition of experienced builders says focus on getting the product right first. Make something people want before worrying about serving millions. Get the plane in the air before optimising its fuel efficiency at 30000 feet.

The bias comes from pattern matching successful companies. “Amazon uses micro services so we should too.” “Netflix has a complex deployment pipeline so that must be the right approach.”

I witnessed this firsthand at a startup where engineers pushed to move from App Engine to Cloud Run for “reliability reasons.” We spent precious runway time refactoring infrastructure instead of improving the product people were paying for. Leadership didn’t understand the tradeoffs. The company eventually went bankrupt.

The inexperienced self-proclaimed senior developers kept insisting “This isn’t how you build for scalability.” But scalability wasn’t our problem. Finding product market fit was.

Scale is a question of when not if. The wisdom comes in recognising the right time to focus on it and be clear about this with both leadership and developers.

And never f*** up payments.