The email came at 2 AM. Subject line: "URGENT: Our app is broken and we don't know why."
I opened it to find a founder who'd spent eighteen months building a promising fintech product. Revenue was growing. Users were happy. And then, without warning, their API started returning errors to 40% of requests.
Their internal team had been staring at logs for six hours. The on-call developer had gone home. The CTO was in another timezone. And the founder was alone, watching their business crumble, unable to do anything but send desperate emails to strangers.
We got on a call. Forty-five minutes later, we'd found the issue—a database connection pool that had exhausted its limits under load. Simple fix. But those forty-five minutes of someone who knew what they were looking at? That saved them probably two more days of downtime and who knows how much revenue.
The founder asked me afterward: "How do I know when I actually need this versus when I should just figure it out ourselves?"
It's a question I wish more founders asked earlier.
The Pattern I See Every Week
Founders usually reach out in one of three moments:
The Crisis Moment: Something is broken, on fire, or otherwise blocking revenue. They need help now. This is expensive and stressful, but at least the problem is obvious.
The Slow Bleed Moment: Things work, but they're harder than they should be. Deployments take forever. Features that should take days take weeks. The team is exhausted but nothing seems visibly wrong. This is harder to diagnose but often more costly in the long run.
The Inflection Point Moment: They're about to make a big decision—raise money, scale operations, launch a new product line—and they want to make sure they're not setting themselves up for disaster. This is the ideal moment, but it rarely feels urgent enough to actually do something about.
Most founders wait until the crisis. A few recognize the slow bleed. Almost nobody acts at the inflection point.
The Signals That Mean It's Time
Here's what I've learned after hundreds of engagements: there are patterns. The same symptoms show up again and again, and they mean the same thing every time.
Signal #1: Your Technical Decisions Are Made in Fear
I talked to a founder last month who'd been stuck on a database decision for three weeks.
"We keep going back and forth," she told me. "PostgreSQL versus MongoDB. Our lead developer wants Mongo, but I read an article saying Postgres is better for our use case, and now we're in this endless debate."
When I asked what their actual data model looked like, it was a simple relational structure. Ten tables, some joins, nothing exotic.
"You're arguing about a problem you don't have," I said. "Either database will work fine for the next two years. Pick one and move on."
The debate wasn't really about technology. It was about fear—fear of making the wrong choice, fear of being judged later, fear of the unknown.
When your technical decisions are driven by anxiety rather than actual requirements, you need outside perspective. Someone who can say "this doesn't matter as much as you think" with authority.
Signal #2: Your Best Developer Is Burning Out
A founder once described his lead engineer to me: "She's incredible. She can debug anything in half the time it would take anyone else. She's basically holding the whole system together."
When I asked how long she'd been at the company, the answer was eighteen months without a real break. Every production issue ended up on her desk. Every architecture decision went through her. She was the single point of failure for the entire technical organization.
The founder saw it as a strength. I saw it as a ticking time bomb.
Three months later, she handed in her resignation. The reason: burnout. The company almost collapsed in the following month as everyone realized how much she'd been handling.
If your technical organization depends on one person—especially a person who's clearly running on empty—that's not a strength. That's a warning sign you need external help before that person leaves.
Signal #3: You Can't Ship Without Breaking Things
There's a particular grimace I see on founders' faces when they describe their deployment process.
"It works on my machine."
"We can't deploy on Fridays."
"Every release requires at least two people working overtime."
"We have a rule: never change more than one thing at a time."
These are all symptoms of a system that has become fragile. The technical debt has accumulated to the point where the cost of any change is unpredictable. And when shipping becomes scary, shipping slows down. And when shipping slows down, your ability to respond to the market slows down too.
I've never seen a startup with deployment anxiety that didn't also have a bunch of underlying issues that, once addressed, made shipping feel normal again. This is fixable—but it helps to have someone who's fixed it before.
Signal #4: You're Making Decisions You Can't Unmake
Some technical decisions are cheap to change. Others will constrain your options for years.
The founder who builds on a proprietary cloud platform will find it hard to leave later. The team that chooses a framework that falls out of maintenance will face an expensive migration. The company that designs their data model wrong will spend months cleaning up bad data.
I've watched startups make these decisions casually, not realizing the weight they were carrying. And I've watched them try to undo those decisions years later, spending more time and money than the original "wrong" choice ever cost.
If you're about to make a decision where the cost of being wrong is high, that's the moment to bring in outside perspective. Not after you've already committed.
Signal #5: Your Team Is Fighting About the Wrong Things
Technical teams argue. That's normal. But sometimes the arguments reveal deeper problems.
I worked with a startup where the engineering team was constantly fighting about code style. Tabs versus spaces. Line length limits. Brace positioning. The debates would go on for days in pull request comments.
Meanwhile, their API was slow, their database was unoptimized, and their mobile app was crashing for 5% of users. None of which anyone seemed to notice because they were too busy arguing about formatting.
This is a symptom of a team that's lost its way. The real problems are too hard or too scary to tackle, so they focus on small things they can control. The solution isn't to get them to stop fighting—it's to clear away the real problems so the petty ones stop mattering.
Signal #6: You're Embarrassed By Your Code
This one comes up in quiet conversations, not in emails or calls. The founder who corners me after a meeting and says, "Between you and me, our codebase is a mess. I know it, our team knows it, and I'm terrified of what would happen if anyone else saw it."
This is more common than you might think. Most startups have code they're not proud of. Most of them also have a plan to fix it "once things calm down."
But here's what I've learned: the teams that are embarrassed by their code but don't do anything about it will still be embarrassed a year from now. And the debt will be worse.
If you know you have a problem and you're not addressing it, that's not a secret you're keeping. It's a debt you're accumulating.
Signal #7: You Don't Know What You Don't Know
The founder who says, "I have no technical background, and I can't tell if what my team is telling me makes sense" is in a particularly vulnerable position.
It's not their fault. They shouldn't need to understand the nuances of database indexing or API design. That's why they hired a technical team.
But the asymmetry of knowledge creates risk. Your team could be making decisions that are perfectly reasonable—or they could be making expensive mistakes, and you'd have no way to know the difference.
External technical perspective isn't about distrust. It's about creating enough information flow that you can actually do your job as a founder—which is making good decisions with incomplete information.
When Not to Hire a Consultancy
I've been honest about when you should hire. Let me be equally honest about when you shouldn't.
Don't hire a consultancy when you're pre-MVP and just need to build something. At that stage, you need execution, not strategy. You need to ship, not plan.
Don't hire a consultancy when you have a strong technical co-founder who has your back. If someone in-house can give you good technical advice, you don't need to pay for it externally.
Don't hire a consultancy when your real problem isn't technical. I've seen founders hire consultants to solve product-market fit problems, team drama, and cash flow issues. Consultants can help you identify when something isn't technical, but we can't fix non-technical problems with technical solutions.
Don't hire a consultancy when you can't afford it. There are cheaper ways to get technical guidance—technical advisors, other founders who've been through it, even good engineers who will chat over coffee. Save the consultancy engagement for when the stakes justify the cost.
The Cost of Waiting
Every founder I've talked to who waited too long has the same regret: "I wish I'd called you six months earlier."
Six months of bad architecture decisions. Six months of slow development. Six months of technical debt accumulating. Six months of stress and uncertainty.
The problems don't get better on their own. They compound. The fix that would have taken a week now takes a month. The refactor that would have been straightforward now requires three weeks of careful planning.
If you see the signals, don't wait. The earlier you address technical issues, the cheaper and easier they are to fix.
The Bottom Line
There's no perfect moment to hire a consultancy. But there are moments when it makes more sense than others.
If you're about to make a big decision and want confidence you're not missing something. If your team is struggling and you can't see a way forward. If something is broken and you don't know how to fix it.
Those moments exist for every startup. The question isn't whether they'll come—they will. The question is whether you'll recognize them when they arrive.
Ready to Talk?
At Startupbricks, we help founders navigate these moments with practical guidance rather than abstract recommendations. If you're seeing any of these signals, let's have a conversation.