Forums
•5h ago
Founders who rebuilt their app from scratch — was it worth it?
About eighteen months into our product, we hit a wall that wasn't a feature problem. Every new thing we shipped took roughly three times longer than the last comparable one. Bug fixes kept reopening. Two engineers had built quiet, undocumented workarounds around the same broken assumption in our data model, and neither knew the other had done it.
The obvious answer was a rewrite. We didn't do it not immediately. We spent a month arguing about it instead, which in hindsight was the most useful month we spent that year, because it forced us to name the actual problem: it wasn't the codebase. It was one early decision about how we modeled user accounts that everything else had been built to work around.
We ended up doing a partial rebuild. Roughly 40% of the code, the part that touched that assumption. Took four months instead of the fourteen a full rewrite would have taken. Shipping slowed but never stopped.
I still don't know if that was the right call. A full rewrite might have cleared out debt we're still paying for. Or it might have killed us the graveyard of startups that spent a year rebuilding while a competitor shipped is not small.
•4mo ago
Build your brand before your product, or launch first and reveal yourself later?
I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.
But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.
Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).
+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.