Technology Stack for a Project: A Guide for Non-Tech Founders

Choosing the right technology for future product implementation can have a significant impact on both the work process and the result you will achieve.

It is common knowledge that choosing the right technology stack can be really problematic, especially if you are a non-technical business owner or startup founder. Making the right choice depends on the product you are going to develop and other important factors.

That is why we decided to write an article to try to examine this issue in more detail and help a non-technical person make decisions.

The average stack size for SMBs with 500 or fewer employees is still 162 apps. For midsize companies with 501 to 2,500 employees, it’s 245 apps. Yes, these are down 6% and 4% year-over-year, respectively. — Chief Marketing Technologist

What is a TechStack? Definition and meaning

A technology stack is a combination of programming languages, frameworks, and other tools used to build and support a product (a web, desktop, or mobile application).

Any given application consists of two main components: the client side (front-end) and the server side (back-end). For further explanation, we can demonstrate it in this graphical form:

Infrastructure and scripts that ensure application operation are on the server side. The client side allows users to see the screen that displays the results of data processing and other results of user interaction with the software product.

You can read more about this in our article “Front-end and back-end. Interaction in plain words“.

How to Choose the Right TechStack for Your Software Development Project

Before you choose a particular set of technologies, you need to think it through. There are cases where a customer wants to do everything with a particular technology. This is only possible if that person has understood all the aspects and weighed all the pros and cons.

For a non-technical business owner, it is tempting to just pick something popular. However, this is not the right approach because it is better to choose based on the needs of your business rather than just technical merit.

So here are some features to look for.

Scale, Budget, and Project Type

A customer who wants to build a small online T-shirt store will require a completely different solution than a customer who wants to build a marketplace that will allow customers to place thousands of orders per day.

Sometimes the type of project and its scale are the key criteria to determine the TechStack. It is best to implement an EdTech startup, an AI platform for analyzing big data, and an e-commerce platform using a specific combination of technologies and languages originally adapted to solve these specific problems.

The project budget is also an important point. If it is small, it would be better to opt for simpler solutions based on ready-made frameworks. If you have sufficient financial resources, you can set your sights on more complex technologies.

Who Is Backing the Technology?

Microsoft is supporting .NET, Apple is developing Swift, and Facebook has created and is developing React. Some other technologies, such as Node.JS, are supported by non-profits, the community, and multiple sponsors.

Adequate support from a large company or a large community provides confidence in the future development of the technology and guarantees its support.

Technology Ecosystem and Maturity

Every technology has an ecosystem consisting of a community of people, components, and tools designed to work with it. All of these factors make product development easier and drive down prices. It is better to use off-the-shelf products than to build them from scratch at your own expense.

The same goes for technology maturity. If it is in the early stages of its life cycle, it is likely to be less reliable. The dynamics of popularity can be easily tracked using Google Trends, and at the same time you can compare several solutions:

Talent Pool

A large number of available developers drives down market prices, making product development more affordable and minimizing dependence on any one developer. You will have no problem finding a .NET or Java professional. However, doing so for Blockchain/Scala may prove to be more challenging.

If you are using popular solutions, you can easily outsource the development, and in this case, the cost of specialists’ work with similar resulting quality can vary significantly.

If you want to save money, you should choose the more popular technologies, as there is more access to talented, affordable developers on the market.

Available Ready-Made Solutions

In this case, we mean frameworks, component libraries, and various tools that simplify development and allow you to use ready-made code fragments.

This allows you to save time and money that would have been spent developing and testing from scratch. This is especially true for large projects.

Flexibility and Scalability

The more reliable and larger the project you are developing, the higher the requirements for its scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility in terms of enhancements/integration. This is especially true if the product is being developed for a company whose business needs change as the market evolves.

In terms of scalability, it is important to consider these two types:

• Vertical: implies the integration of additional elements in an application (CRM and ERP);
• Horizontal: means the possibility of its operation on a large number of devices and with a large number of users simultaneously (a large e-commerce project).

Sometimes one language is not enough. It is often necessary to use a combination of several languages, each of which solves a specific problem. In this case, we are talking about microservices architecture, which you can read about in our blog.

Service and Support

Development is not the only issue. Every software product requires some support and maintenance costs. Non-technical entrepreneurs often neglect this as a budget item, but any experienced developer is aware of it and will warn you about it.

Every technology has its own life cycle. Therefore, it is necessary to ask the vendor how they will resolve security issues, provide updates, and ensure other similar aspects.

It is also important to understand that different technologies require different resources to achieve normal performance. In some cases, simple shared hosting will suffice and companies can safely employ people with the necessary expertise. In other cases, dedicated servers are required and it would be wise to outsource the development.

Popular Technology Stack Services

If you want to learn what well-known startups and other public companies use as their technology stack or to compare several options, you can visit dedicated websites.

It will be very useful if you want to create something similar or trace patterns. For example, Stackshare.io is useful. According to the service, the stack for Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox is as follows:

This type of data can also help you make a more realistic assessment.

Takeaways

There are no perfect solutions, and it all boils down to having a good development team to deal with all the technical issues. It is important to remember that the quality of the product is ultimately determined not by the tools, but by the quality of the work.

You can use almost any technology to implement your project. The most important thing is that the developers involved are able to deliver the result in accordance with the stated requirements (budget, deadlines and functionality).

Looking for a trusted technology partner? Accelerate your roadmap with our experienced, dedicated software development team. Contact us and let’s discuss the details.