— 2 min read

15 Tech Mistakes that wasted my time and money for FREE.

Starting a tech project as a non-technical founder can be difficult, and there is an apparent lack of resources online to help educate and save founders from making mistakes.

Here’s a list of mistakes other non-technical founders have made as a starting point in avoiding the same mistakes! If some of the terminology doesn’t make sense, don’t worry —this is only meant to give you a sense of the different issues that come up to look out for.

  1. Started my tech project as a SPA when SEO was a critical and important consideration, so we had to re-implement several pages using a different framework that supports SSR.
  2. Used AWS to host our servers and cloud infrastructure, costing around $600/mo when $150/mo was sufficient to get the same deployment using different services
  3. Had a developer spin up a server, and they didn’t leave any documentation on what was installed or done to deploy the application to production
  4. Didn’t check to see if my brand name was available as a .com domain before designing
  5. Hired a PM that essentially did nothing
  6. Launched a static landing page website on Kubernetes
  7. Didn’t have my code on Github, so when my developer left I couldn’t have a new developer look at the code
  8. Hired an outsourced agency, paid them 10k, and got a buggy product that didn’t work
  9. Hired an outsourced agency that developed the product in an unknown and outdated tech stack that no other developer understood
  10. Paid 100k for an ecommerce store build-out that amounted to two pages, didn’t write any penalty clauses for missed deadlines, product features, bugs, etc.
  11. Had a developer manually implement the admin panel, taking around 15-20% of their time along-side the actual website
  12. Decided to manually handle email, payment processing, or other staple pieces of functionality instead of using a paid $/monthly service to manage it for us
  13. Had a developer manually implement API/Graphql endpoints
  14. Didn’t use a CMS system so I have to ask my developer to make copy-based changes on the site constantly
  15. Hiring more than 2 developers thinking it would make my project finish faster