Ask HN: When to walk away from a toxic project

Re:Ask HN: When to walk away from a toxic project by montrose on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @07:09AM (#16857223)

Counterintuitive as it may seem, this startup may be doing things right. If user growth is causing load issues, that means users like the product, and that the company is growing fast, which is the high bit of predicting whether a startup will succeed.

A startup with a product users love but creaking infrastructure is better off than one with excellent infrastructure and a product that's a dog.

Startups with both a product users love and excellent infrastructure? A lot rarer than you might think, especially at this stage.

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Re:Ask HN: When to walk away from a toxic project by brianwawok on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @08:03PM (#16863467)

> Counterintuitive as it may seem, this startup may be doing things right. If user growth is causing load issues, that means users like the product, and that the company is growing fast, which is the high bit of predicting whether a startup will succeed.

Yes this. In a perfect world, you have a perfect design and lots of growth. In the real world, sometimes you have a lot more of one than the other. Trust me when I say you would much rather be running an app with 100k users and scaling problems than an app with 3 users that can handle 1 million users.

That said, what are you doing to fix the root problems? I bet they could use someone to take ownship of the large issues. Come up with a 1 year plan to resolve the issues. Maybe 6 bigger projects of 1-3 months each. Present them to the owners, and try to get buy in to do them over the next year. I bet you could work 50% on firefighting, and 50% on making big changes - and get the app to a good place in a year. I run a tiny startup, but I would love any employee that did that ;)

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