Embracing the 3-Month Rule: A Technical Strategy for Startups
In the world of startups, the wisdom of Paul Graham resonates loudly: “Do things that don’t scale.” While this advice is popular, many overlook the practical implementation of this principle in technical development. After eight months of developing my AI podcast platform, I’ve crafted an effective strategy to navigate the challenges of scalability versus the immediate needs of a growing project. Welcome to my “3-Month Rule,” a concept that emphasizes short-lived hacks to better understand user needs and optimize development processes.
Rethinking Scalability in Startups
As tech professionals, we often find ourselves trained to focus on building scalable architectures from the outset—think microservices, distributed systems, and elaborate design patterns. However, in a startup environment, investing effort into solutions that cater to future demands may lead to unnecessary complexity. My approach, guided by the 3-Month Rule, compels me to quickly implement straightforward, albeit imperfect, coding solutions. These are designed for immediate deployment, allowing me to focus on learning what users truly require.
Current Unscalable Solutions: Thoughtful Choices Behind My Infrastructure
1. Single VM for Everything
Currently, my platform operates on a single virtual machine (VM) costing just $40 a month, hosting the database, web server, and background tasks—all without redundancy and with manual backups.
Why This Works:
In just two months, I’ve gained profound insights into my resource needs—far beyond what traditional capacity planning could provide. My “AI-heavy” application peaks at just 4GB of RAM. Had I opted for a more complex Kubernetes setup, I would probably be managing idle resources instead of focusing on user demands. Each crash (a total of two) yields valuable lessons about the true points of failure, which are often surprising.
2. Hardcoded Configurations
My codebase employs hardcoded constants for important configurations, such as pricing tiers and user limits, rather than using environment variables or config files.
The Advantage:
I can efficiently search for configuration values across the entire codebase and track changes in Git history. Over three months, I’ve made only three configuration changes; this represents a mere 15 minutes of redeployment compared to the hours it would have taken to build a proper configuration service.
3. SQLite for Production Use
Yes, SQLite is the backbone of my multi-user web application—holding only 47MB of data and easily
One Comment
Thank you for sharing your detailed approach with the 3-Month Rule—I find it to be a refreshingly pragmatic perspective that acknowledges the realities of early-stage startup development. Emphasizing quick, tangible solutions over perfect, scalable architectures allows teams to iterate rapidly and learn directly from user interactions.
Your choice to start with a single VM, hardcoded configs, and SQLite reflects a valuable understanding: *the most crucial insights often come from simple experiments and real-world feedback, not from complex infrastructure.* This approach not only reduces upfront costs and complexity but also accelerates the feedback loop, enabling informed decisions about what to scale later.
It’s a strategic reminder that in the initial phases, speed and flexibility often outweigh the benefits of perfect engineering—saving time and resources to focus on validated learning. As you suggest, these unscalable solutions can serve as valuable experiments to inform more robust, scalable systems down the line.
Looking forward, it will be interesting to see how your infrastructure evolves once you’ve validated user needs and prioritized the most impactful scaling strategies. Thanks again for sharing this insightful framework!