I was rebuilding Mevin after validating the MVP. The goal was simple. Make it scale, start selling to more people. I told myself a different story. Ruby on Rails would be slow and costly. Server bills would kill us. So I optimized for cost instead of survival.
That story pushed me into the weeds. I considered nodejs on AWS Lambda, then dropped it because of the cold start issue. I picked SvelteKit because it felt lighter than React. I convinced myself that "faster framework" would mean cheaper servers and safer runway.
The assumption was entirely wrong after all.
SvelteKit's flexibility looked promising, until we had to make hundreds of micro decisions with no guardrails. Flexibility without conventions quickly turned into chaos.
My partner and I spent weeks inventing structure, introducing typescript, debating architectures that we thought would make our lives easier. We weren't shipping. We weren't selling. All we did was just burning runway.
The truth is, I already have 13 years of experience in Rails. My brain is wired in it. I know where the code goes before I type it. It's instinctive. When we realized we were wasting a lot of time, we finally switched back to Rails, we replicated 6 weeks of work in 6 hours. That was the wake-up call.
I realized I was solving for server cost when I should have been solving for survival. The real risk wasn't higher bills. It was running out of time.
Now Rails is the foundation. It lets us move fast, talk to customers, and extend our runway. Conventions, speed, and comfort matters more than theoretical savings. As indie hackers, our moat isn't clever code, it's survival.
All that matters is how fast we can start selling.
---
PS: Not all of us have the same mental health, getting physically sick for more than 6 months every other day is not a joke, it makes you take wrong decisions thinking that you are doing the right thing. Bad physical health translates to bad mental health, bad mental health puts force you to do mistakes perpetually. I could have simply trusted my experience as an expert in Rails, but my mental health wasn't something that allowed me to trust. I just started getting better in terms of both physical health.
That story pushed me into the weeds. I considered nodejs on AWS Lambda, then dropped it because of the cold start issue. I picked SvelteKit because it felt lighter than React. I convinced myself that "faster framework" would mean cheaper servers and safer runway.
The assumption was entirely wrong after all.
SvelteKit's flexibility looked promising, until we had to make hundreds of micro decisions with no guardrails. Flexibility without conventions quickly turned into chaos.
My partner and I spent weeks inventing structure, introducing typescript, debating architectures that we thought would make our lives easier. We weren't shipping. We weren't selling. All we did was just burning runway.
The truth is, I already have 13 years of experience in Rails. My brain is wired in it. I know where the code goes before I type it. It's instinctive. When we realized we were wasting a lot of time, we finally switched back to Rails, we replicated 6 weeks of work in 6 hours. That was the wake-up call.
I realized I was solving for server cost when I should have been solving for survival. The real risk wasn't higher bills. It was running out of time.
Now Rails is the foundation. It lets us move fast, talk to customers, and extend our runway. Conventions, speed, and comfort matters more than theoretical savings. As indie hackers, our moat isn't clever code, it's survival.
All that matters is how fast we can start selling.
---
PS: Not all of us have the same mental health, getting physically sick for more than 6 months every other day is not a joke, it makes you take wrong decisions thinking that you are doing the right thing. Bad physical health translates to bad mental health, bad mental health puts force you to do mistakes perpetually. I could have simply trusted my experience as an expert in Rails, but my mental health wasn't something that allowed me to trust. I just started getting better in terms of both physical health.