Aug 9, 2021
Bootstrapping Startup!
Millennium 2000 is definitely a time of Ideas. Not only having an Idea but also implementing them on scale.
By the end of 2020 we got world famous cloud kitchens like Uber Eat, Zomato etc! Few years back who would have thought that anybody can get food delivered at their doorstep without getting out of their comfy bed.
It’s not only about food, you think of a thing to do and somebody sitting in their workspace might have already been working on it to make it look like the easiest possible task for you.
In this era the best channel or medium chosen for startup is the Internet and it’s not only proven but satisfying every possible condition. But wait, there is more, not everybody is familiar with all the things about the internet or computers, even the dude you know who has fixed his eyes with a computer screen permanently 🤓 might not know all the things, and quite frankly it requires a team from different skill sets to set up a proper channel.
Having a workforce, maybe just a smaller one with 3–4 people in it may not always get into the right path for the person who wanted to start something from his/her garage.
Well this article is also not in any kind of rescue mission but to show some lights on how you can plan your IT system in order to work with most reusability to help you to save some bucks and put your minimum valued product a bit early for public usage.
Different Phases for your Product
A small explanation of above infographic, for development of a product ideally it goes with 7 phases, and trust me you would never know that you are following it but actually none of the step would be skipped a single time.
First we plan about project. What kind of resources we want, costing, deadlines, milestones all these things would be covered in this phase. Once we shortlist all the things that we planned we move to next step which is Analysis, in this phase we communicate things which are already planned to the engineers, Engineers (usually they pretend they are doing hard work 😃 ) would try to figure out what could be best approach to do the project work. They would decide technologies, infrastructure, manpower and couple more things.
Just after the analysis comes the Design part. It can be Wireframes, Database, Design Patterns, High Level Diagrams, basically everything which developer can understand and Investors don’t and developers can talk bad about investors in code word 😂. That’s not right, this will become a bridge between the understanding of Tech and Non Tech people.
Now comes the Development part, be prepared everyone, this is the part where you can oftentimes get to Zoom with God of death, All of the writing code and debugging, bug fixing, late nighter discussions, all nighter discussions, discussion in dream would happen here. You know when somebody decide to become a Software Developer they take an oath “I will not sleep and I won’t let anybody sleep till the eternity of life” . This is absolutely right and you would get to know about this in development phase, but at last when somehow your coding part is done all the code would move to next phase where the task done by developer would be tested.
Usually the Testing would be done by Quality Analysts but trust me they are more or less developer’s friends, so all the testing would be done when your code would be deployed for live use or by the stakeholders themselves.
You read the term “Deployed” this stands for Releasing phase of application. At this time of automation this is the most invisible phase too. You should also put some effort since the beginning to automate your deployment process and save a lot of time from manual deployment every time when new issues are fixed or new features have been implemented.
Last phase is Maintenance, it’s a never ending process. You keep adding new features, keep fixing issue as maintenance and it is nothing but complete life cycle again.
Web applications on Earth
We can breakdown our projects into two parts, Frontend and Backend. All the things which your end user is looking at like Sign in form with email and password fields, creating post fields, uploading image buttons these are all Frontend items, and when you click on any of these items the actions are being performed at backend. Backend and Database works together in a very tightly coupled manner, frontend never access the database directly it will always go through the API and business logics.
Now let’s understand above image. End user sees your frontend part which is basically your project inside user’s web browser, mobile applications, smart watch and inside Dearest Alexa and when you click on Sign in button or says Hey Alexa, play smooth jazz! it passes your command to API, API then check who is this user, what is he asking for, search in database, take out the data and send back to frontend to show or to play. Basically all the web based applications are working on same principal. Things got different with the technologies part and each technology serves their own role
The Tech Battle
Real Battle starts when with all pros and cons one has to choose relevant technology stack. To start with let’s think what all major modules we want to build and in general when we wanted to build a customer facing application we need few things to be in place very first like An Admin Panel to create or modify all the data or content that we want to show to the customer, your product catalogue, carts, campaigns and blogs are few examples of that. A Website for end user to browse in PC, it may sound that this is not that necessary if you are building something mobile specific only but when you look at other aspects like search engine ranking, website linking, customer engagement, search engine bots or crawler support we need a website and its pretty much important too even if you have nothing to do on a website. You might find for some of other projects use website for blogging and sharing purpose only. Last but not the least Mobile Applications which supports Android and IOS phone devices. As advance features you might also want to build some utilities for wearables like smart watch, or Alexa but that is another story.
Remember in the beginning of article I said we need a IT team of 3 — 4 person to work on your project, now you can relate them with why we need them, but as the title says to boost your MVP launch we will try how we can plan so that a minimum valued product is up and running pretty soon.
- Admin Panel
First of all it’s not a customer facing system, we can phase out fancy things for Admin panel to next phases, and keep it simple and easy to build fast. All the people who are going to use it would somehow be associated with organisation and they can be trained about how to use it. We also don’t need Search Engine Optimisation for this part and to be frank a little bit of load time issue (first time when pages load in browser) is also not that big problem.
The most desirable architectural design to build Admin panels are Single Page Application (SPA) with client side data storage (state) mechanism. The most advance benefits of using SPA is anytime when you click a link in system it only calls the API to load the data not Javascript or CSS resources while non SPA pages first load the page, then resources embedded in page and then data.
With the client side storage mechanism (State Management) one can avoid several API calls and keep server free for unnecessary loads, for example logged in user’s data can be saved in state and calling API to get user name and subscription plans every time while navigating inside application can be avoided. Remember with technology every millisecond matters, If we are able to remove 5 request from one user in one session we are helping servers with removing thousands of api call when few people browsing it. This will also help you not to worry about the load balancing or server architecture cost in the very beginning.
- APIs
Choosing API can vary requirement to requirement. We need to analysis more about the purpose of application. Let’s take two scenarios, in first scenario we wanted to build a platform to take surveys of all people getting covid vaccinated, and will see reports hows it going in various regions. With this purpose of application we can extract few information like we don’t need heavy calculations as we do in Finance based application. we might need high network based system where for each person getting vaccinated number for people getting notified, in this scenario Node as core would be best suited technology. Second scenario, we wanted to build Analytics based applications, where we have heavy data available and we wanted to train machines to forecast trends with available data, Python is famous for this kind of requirements
It depends on what kind of purpose system is going to serve and based on that one has to choose technology for API. Be informed, choosing a technology to build API doesn’t guarantee for best architecture and you need to be prepare for using multiple technologies for a project
- Database
With all the topics of IT Database also come up with long list of do’s and don’t, let’s not go there and focus on one things which is two types of database. One where we know all the fields from which we would be accepting informations examples are Pay slip entries, Registration forms, Post creations in social media etc, we know that what all information would be available to take from user, and other type is where fields are not fixed, like Surveys, Analytics. First kind is Schema based database and second one is non schema based.
MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL, MS Access are several option to choose between if you need schema based database. MongoDB, DynamoDB are options for non schema (NoSQL) based database. MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB are open source and available free 🤑.
- Customer Website
All the information you curated will be available for End user on Customer website, but it’s not only informations. The requirements for customer websites are fast load, easy to access, smooth experience, cool user interface, awesome designs and all the other things which requires super level of creativity. We don’t have tools for creativity, you need to look for these awesome people but you can definitely choose tools for other things like fast load and smooth experience.
Customer website would also be used for search engine ranking, link building and other things related to digital marketing and for all these purpose we need Server side rendering (SSR). We have options like Aspx, PHP which has provided SSR capabilities. Working with ASPX become challenging over the time due to coupling with .Net based framework and it means platform dependency and you have to use Windows platform on various occasions. for JS based system Next.js is one of the great tools which comes with awesome inbuilt features like Image optimisation, fast refresh etc.
- Mobile Applications using Webview
Remember we said we want to release our MVP pretty early and when it comes to mobile application part, Webview is life saver. Webview is a component provided by Android and IOS sdks, where you can open any website inside web but you will not have browser features like bookmarking, incognito etc available for use and this makes user experience as mobile application with a little effect.
Since you are opening your server side webpage inside webview you might find a loading screen visible every time when you navigate pages but here comes the benefits of using Next as framework, when using Next prefetch and hybrid SSG and SSR features helps you to solve it for you. and load time will become very less
- Server and Infrastructure
Don’t even think about buying servers of your own to host your application, they will cost you fortune and universe for maintenance. Cloud solutions are perfect now a days and they are going to stay here for another century at least, so go for cloud solutions. Still thinking about how well they work in terms of performance let me give you some examples. Dropbox, Netflix, NASA these are few world known application completely running on Amazon Workspace (AWS Cloud). Other cloud solutions you might consider is Google Cloud Engine, and Microsoft Azure they are also doing great job with excellent training and support.
Just because you are here reading title Bootstrapping startup, here is your hundred thousand worth tip, use AWS activate program to get credit of $100,000 to build and scale your application 🤫, find link below
Pretty long article, but you choose the damn hot topic too. Hope you get some useful information and might consider implementing few points, your choice. If you need any other consultation about any thing IT you can find me on almost all major social network like LinkedIn, Facebook just search Ravi Bhushan or Mail me. Until then good bye 🙏🏼
