Author: Fedir Kompaniets, CEO and IT Consultant at Gart Solutions
Rapid Growth — A Major Risk for Startups
Startups often face a tough decision: whether to scale quickly or focus on building a more refined technical solution. More often than not, the emphasis is on rapid growth, which can lead to serious risks—insufficient time for thorough testing, creating scalable architecture, or addressing technical challenges.
Such oversights can become costly: leading to accumulated technical debt, scalability issues, and product performance failures.
At Gart Solutions, we frequently deal with cases where technical limitations prevent startups from growing and scaling effectively (or make it prohibitively expensive, which hits the product’s unit economics hard).
Usually, companies come to us when they’re already facing massive cloud service expenses, after a security breach, or when they urgently need to speed up delivery to outpace their competitors with new product updates.
Unfortunately, few seek help early enough to proactively prevent issues and build scalable architecture and services from the ground up.
To avoid these challenges, we’ve outlined a few key recommendations to help keep your product secure and ready for growth.
IT Audit and Consulting
A simple, proactive approach to identifying technical pitfalls early, ensuring stable growth aligned with business objectives.
IT audit goes beyond a technical review
Many startups overlook the value of IT audits and consulting in their early stages. By dismissing them as unnecessary expenses of time and money, they risk accumulating technical debt, which can later result in product failures or costly fixes.
We approach IT auditing not just as a code review but as a thorough evaluation of the IT infrastructure, offering recommendations to enhance the overall technical performance.
Key steps in an IT audit include:
- Architecture review: Assess the current architecture, identify vulnerabilities, and suggest optimizations.
- Performance evaluation: Review resource efficiency and recommend improvements to enhance the product’s speed and stability.
- Security analysis: Identify security weaknesses and propose measures to strengthen data protection.
- Compliance audit: Ensure regulatory compliance and assist in preparing for assessments.
An IT audit not only helps identify potential issues early but also provides actionable insights for resolving them.
IT Monitoring – Continuous Stability Control
While IT audits help identify current issues, IT monitoring ensures real-time stability control. This is especially crucial for rapidly growing startups implementing new features. Continuous monitoring allows for early detection of potential threats and helps avoid downtime, which can negatively impact users and unit economics.
How should monitoring be set up?
- Monitoring critical metrics: Track server load, database performance, and network failures.
- Proactive response: Set up automated alerts for anomalies, allowing technical specialists to address issues swiftly.
- Analytics and reporting: Regularly analyze data to identify patterns and provide recommendations for further optimization.
With our IT monitoring approach, startups can scale confidently without the fear of technical failures or user loss.
Business Logic at the Core of Technical Solutions
Developing a technical solution for a startup is more than just configuring servers or choosing programming languages.
At Gart Solutions, we understand that every technical solution must align with the company’s business goals. That’s why it’s essential to work closely with business owners and analysts to provide solutions that not only address technical challenges but also drive the startup’s commercial success.
How to merge business and technical expertise?
- Market analysis: We study market conditions and competitors to propose an optimal architecture that meets both current and future needs.
- Scalability as a priority: With the startup’s growth plans in mind, we design solutions that can easily adapt to an increasing user base or new features.
- Cost optimization: Taking the startup’s budget into account, we offer solutions that provide maximum efficiency at minimal cost.
This approach helps startups quickly respond to market changes, adapt their products to user needs, and grow confidently without the fear of technical failures.
Innovative IT Architecture
To enable rapid scaling, it’s essential to develop an IT architecture that allows for the seamless addition of new features and adapts to growing demands.
Leveraging cloud technologies also provides the necessary flexibility and efficiency.
Additionally, automating key processes is crucial to reduce development time and ensure the swift launch of new features without delays.
Training and Support for the Technical Team
If a startup’s team lacks specific expertise, we help them develop it. Our recommendations on using tools for big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and other modern technologies enable the team to maximize the efficiency of both development and operational processes. This, in turn, impacts the startup’s success and its ability to compete with other products.
Case Studies
The success of a technical solution is measured by its impact on business metrics, and this is precisely the core challenge we address.
Below are examples of client cases where our technical solutions facilitated scaling and growth.
- Optimization, automation, and enhanced security: Technical improvements enabled market expansion. Read the full case study here.
- Reduced AWS costs by 40% and improved efficiency: Discover how.
- Cut costs by 80% using Azure spot instances: Learn how we leveraged non-reserved cloud storage for cost efficiency. Find out more here.
Gart Solutions helps startups scale quickly and avoid critical mistakes. Our immediate goal is to assist over 100 Ukrainian startups in making sound technical decisions, enabling them to grow and contribute to the economy of Ukraine.
