Another Common Early Start-up Mistake

18 Aug 2009

In most common early start-up mistakes, Mark Suster talks about very interesting and insightful points. However, I feel like adding one more point, quite known but often taken granted, more specific to software or web start-ups.

If you are a software or web start-up, it's really important to use the experience of founders (if they are come from technical background) or your core team to have following in order, as soon as possible.

Guidelines and best-practices: code, documentation (wiki), version-control (branching/tagging - when and how?), bug-tracking, testing (unit-tests, functional-tests), deployment, performance objectives and related stuff.

I would not go crazy (get distracted too much) about these initially but have these in place and encourage(mandatory - certain cases) everyone to contribute, follow, discuss and document. It's lot easier to adapt things at an earlier stage rather than later.

I strongally recommend you to read Martin Fowler's article Technical Debt to learn more about the importance of having things in order.