Real-world notes for founders navigating the messy road from idea to launched product.
"PostHog, Mixpanel, or Amplitude for your startup? Real pricing, feature comparison, and implementation complexity for bootstrapped teams choosing product analytics."
Your developer told you the database choice "depends on your data model." That is true but unhelpful.
A founder texted me a screenshot of their Vercel bill: $347 for one month. Their app had 12,000 monthly active users and was still pre-revenue.
Firebase bills you $1,847 in month six for an app that costs $43 on Supabase. Same features, same user count, wildly different economics.
Vercel's serverless functions time out at 10 seconds on Hobby tier, 60 seconds on Pro. Your PDF generation takes 45 seconds. Your data sync runs for 5 minutes. Your batch email send processes 10,000 records over 8 minutes.
Auth0's sales page shows "Free up to 7,500 active users." Six months later, you are paying $240/month for 3,200 users.
Hardware MVPs cost 30-50x more than software and can't pivot. Here's when IoT makes sense and when it's a path to the startup graveyard.
90% of Web3 projects fail, but the market is growing. Here's when Web3 actually matters and when it's a distraction that will kill your startup.
Cutting-edge technology kills early-stage startups. Here's the boring stack that lets you ship fast, hire easily, and scale when you're ready—with specific recommendations.
