The founder was frustrated. After eighteen months of development, his platform was struggling. Performance was degrading. New features took longer to build. And the development team was exhausted.
"We built it wrong," he told me. "We built it for a company that doesn't exist yet."
I looked at his architecture. He was right. It was elegant. Sophisticated. Beautiful, even. It was also completely wrong for where his company actually was.
He'd built a system designed for scale. For millions of users. For a team of dozens of engineers. For a complexity that hadn't materialized yet—and might never materialize.
The irony was obvious: the architecture he'd chosen to prepare for success was preventing him from succeeding.
The Architecture Trap
Here's what happens to almost every first-time founder:
You have an idea. You imagine it succeeding. You see it growing, scaling, handling thousands of users. And you make decisions based on that vision.
The problem is that the vision is a fantasy. It's not based on reality. It's based on hope.
And hope is a terrible architect.
When you build for the company you hope to become, you're making decisions without information. You don't know what your actual scale will be. You don't know what features will matter. You don't know what problems you'll actually face.
But you build anyway. You make choices that feel responsible, like you're being a good steward of the company's future. And those choices lock you into a path that's often the opposite of what you need.
The Three Wrong Decisions
I've seen the same wrong decisions made again and again. Different technologies. Different contexts. Same pattern.
Wrong Decision #1: Building for a Scale You Won't Reach
A fintech startup I worked with had built their entire system on Kubernetes. Every service was containerized. Every deployment was orchestrated. The infrastructure was enterprise-grade.
The problem: they had 200 users.
Two hundred users. Not two hundred thousand. Two hundred.
Their system could handle a million users. It could handle ten million. But it couldn't handle their current reality, because the complexity of managing all that infrastructure was consuming their entire team.
They were running a startup like it was a corporation. And they were bleeding time and money on infrastructure that was solving problems they didn't have.
Wrong Decision #2: Creating Complexity That Wasn't Required
I reviewed a startup's architecture once and found something remarkable: seventeen microservices.
Seventeen. For a product with three main features.
Each service had its own repository, its own deployment pipeline, its own monitoring, its own on-call rotation. The team spent more time managing infrastructure than building product.
When I asked why they'd chosen microservices, the answer was predictable: "We wanted to build something that could scale."
But here's what they hadn't considered: microservices solve coordination problems. They're valuable when multiple teams need to work independently on different parts of the system. When one person is doing everything, microservices create more problems than they solve.
They eventually consolidated to three services. Development velocity tripled.
Wrong Decision #3: Choosing Flexibility Over Simplicity
A founder once told me about their architecture: "We designed it to be flexible. Whatever we need to build in the future, the system can handle it."
That's what he said. And it sounded reasonable. Who wants to build something that can't adapt?
The problem was that flexibility has costs. Every abstraction, every configuration option, every generic piece of code—it's all complexity that makes the present harder.
Their system was so flexible that doing anything simple required navigating through layers of indirection. Want to add a field to a database? Three services need updates. Want to change how a feature works? Good luck finding where it's actually implemented.
Why These Decisions Feel Right
Here's the thing: these wrong decisions don't feel wrong when you make them. They feel smart. They feel responsible. They feel like what a good founder would do.
Building for scale feels like good planning. Creating flexible systems feels like thinking ahead. Using sophisticated tools feels like hiring the best people.
The problem is that these decisions are context-dependent. They're good in some situations and terrible in others. And early-stage startups are almost never the situation where they make sense.
The Real Question to Ask
Instead of "What architecture do I need for the company I hope to become?", ask a different question:
"What architecture do I need for the company I actually am?"
Right now, you're probably:
- A small team (or solo founder)
- Building something new (so you don't know what will work)
- Looking for product-market fit (so everything might change)
- Running on limited runway (so every month matters)
The architecture you need is simple. Boring. A little bit embarrassing in its simplicity.
And that's exactly right.
The Right-Sized Architecture
Here's what right-sized architecture looks like for a startup:
It's a monolith until you have a reason not to be a monolith. It uses boring, proven technologies that have been around for years. It makes simple choices that can be changed later. It prioritizes understanding over flexibility.
The founder I mentioned at the beginning? We spent three months refactoring his system to something simpler. Not because we wanted a worse architecture, but because we wanted an architecture that matched his reality.
His team went from exhausted to productive. Features that took weeks now took days. And he finally had a foundation that could grow with his actual company, not the hypothetical one he'd imagined.
Need Help Right-Sizing Your Architecture?
At Startupbricks, we help founders build architectures that match where they actually are—not where they hope to be. If your system is more complex than it needs to be, let's talk.