from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some bad engineering decisions that screwed startups?

by marwann on 7/29/19, 11:20 AM with 7 comments

I'm looking for startups that failed because of a big engineering mistake, be it technical or in the management side, and I can't think of many famous examples.

I'm thinking about some reasons: - Being dependant on external services/code, eg. when an author removed some modules on NPM that caused thousands of websites to break - Bad hiring decisions in tech teams - Trying to patch bad code instead of starting over - Focusing on research (or code cleanliness) instead of finding product market fit

Maybe Google wave that had a buggy interface (though I suspect this wasn't the main problem), HP Touchpad that went out in a rush and was clearly badly developed.

Any clue?

  • by epc on 7/29/19, 12:22 PM

    You could argue Friendster lost a lot of its early, first mover, momentum to MySpace and Facebook because of its initial implementation in Java JSP. By the time of its rewrite in PHP, MySpace had become the "in place", followed fairly quickly by Facebook (while MySpace foundered under Newscorp ownership).

    You don't hear about the failures because they rarely get enough traction to be popular (and if they got traction then typically investors will pour money in to keep the startup afloat).

    Also many survivors of such startups are under NDAs which mostly serve to protect the management teams.

  • by blodovnik on 7/29/19, 11:39 AM

    Twitter didn't fail but it was on its knees for a long time due to poor architecture and technical capability in its early years.