Pieter Levels (the guy who made Nomad List) reached $1 000 000 ARR with a single VPS, all his code in an index.php file and using FTP to transfer the latest code to his server...
I think if you’re a solo founder you have to accept on day one you’re at a time disadvantage when it comes to the actual hours you’ll spend on moving the business forward vs admin, ops, legal stuff etc etc and so you have to really fight smart!
I.e K8S? Definitely don’t need it. Complex CI/Deployment workflow? Nope, just the minimal shell scripts to do clean deploys and rollbacks. Pay for a HA RDS so you never need to worry about DB replication etc.
If you just work with the minimal set of tools you’re comfortable with and relentlessly keep things simple it’s possible. I’ve built high availability stuff as a solo founder and still found (at least some...) time to work on sales and the business.
I think you are right. There's a big difference between the technology I would use in a larger organization compared to solo projects.
Unless you build a side project to learn a new technology, you should use something "boring" that you know well.
Here's my personal choices in preferred order:
1. Static web sites - Just upload to S3 behind a CDN and forget about it
2. Server rendered website - PHP. It may not be something you brag about, but in my experience it just "works" and has excellent uptime.
Note: If I had to recommend something to a larger organization, I would probably suggest Next.js to attract developers. PHP is often associated with "old school" tech
3. REST service - Spring Boot. I have so much experience with it and there are so many Spring projects that supports a huge range of technologies from monitoring to data
I think if you’re a solo founder you have to accept on day one you’re at a time disadvantage when it comes to the actual hours you’ll spend on moving the business forward vs admin, ops, legal stuff etc etc and so you have to really fight smart!
I.e K8S? Definitely don’t need it. Complex CI/Deployment workflow? Nope, just the minimal shell scripts to do clean deploys and rollbacks. Pay for a HA RDS so you never need to worry about DB replication etc.
If you just work with the minimal set of tools you’re comfortable with and relentlessly keep things simple it’s possible. I’ve built high availability stuff as a solo founder and still found (at least some...) time to work on sales and the business.