by Gary Worthington, More Than Monkeys

Startups are told to “ship fast, break things”. That works until the breaking part involves your product falling over the moment you get traction. An MVP does not need to be enterprise-grade, but it does need to survive the jump from “five friendly beta users” to “a few thousand people you don’t know hitting it on Monday morning”.

Here’s how to build something minimal without it being fragile.

1. Keep it boring

When you’re under pressure to move fast, it’s tempting to experiment with shiny new frameworks or roll your own infrastructure. Resist the urge.
Pick technologies that are well-trodden, have solid documentation, and won’t vanish when the maintainer gets bored.

• Backend: a mainstream framework (FastAPI, Django, Rails, Express)
• Database: Postgres or MySQL, managed if you can
• Hosting: AWS, GCP, or Azure managed services

Your MVP should be about testing the product idea, not whether a niche database can survive production load.

2. Design for “next week growth”

You don’t need to engineer for millions of users, but assume success means you will add one or two zeros to your traffic sooner than expected.

That means:

• Use a managed database, not SQLite on a laptop
• Keep state out of your app servers so you can scale horizontally
• Deploy with IaC so you can recreate environments quickly. If Terraform is your tool of choice, this guide on structuring Terraform projects explains how to organise modules, stacks, and environments in a way that doesn’t paint you into a corner.

It’s about simple architecture that can stretch without being rebuilt from scratch.

3. Accept technical debt, document it

There will be shortcuts. Hard-coded config, a missing retry, that API you did not secure properly. That is fine as long as you know where the skeletons are.

Keep a running list of deliberate trade-offs. When investors ask what stands between you and scale, you can point to specifics instead of mumbling about “some refactors”.

4. Don’t ignore testing entirely

You do not need 90 percent coverage, but you do need confidence. Focus on:

• Unit tests for core business logic
• Health checks to confirm the system is alive
• A few end-to-end flows (signup, payment, critical workflows)

This is about being able to deploy without panic when someone writes about you in TechCrunch. If you want a deeper look at how startups can strike the balance, see Testing in Startups: How to Balance Speed and Quality Without Going Broke.

5. Have a basic observability setup

You won’t predict every scaling issue, but you can make sure you notice when something starts to burn.

• Centralised logging (CloudWatch, ELK, Datadog)
• Metrics on latency, error rates, and throughput
• Simple dashboards and alerts (PagerDuty, Slack)

This does not have to be elaborate. Even a graph that goes red when your error rate spikes is better than waiting for angry emails.

6. Keep costs predictable

An MVP that falls over at 10,000 users is bad. One that racks up £20k in AWS spend overnight is worse.

• Turn on billing alerts
• Use autoscaling with sensible limits
• Prefer serverless for spiky workloads, reserved instances for steady ones

Costs should grow with usage, not surprise you mid-fundraise. For a deeper dive on this, see The Startup Guide to Cloud Costs: What Founders Get Wrong About AWS Bills.

7. Run a load test before launch

Not a six-week JMeter marathon. Just a simple test to see if your system melts under a modest concurrent load.

Tools like Locust or k6 can simulate a few thousand users. You will find the bottlenecks early and fix them cheaply.

The MVP rule of thumb

If you would be embarrassed to demo your architecture diagram to another engineer, you have cut too many corners. If you would be embarrassed to demo your product to a customer, you have spent too much time polishing the tech.

Get that balance right and your MVP won’t just validate the idea, it will carry you through your first wave of real adoption without collapsing.

Gary Worthington is a software engineer, delivery consultant, and fractional CTO who helps teams move fast, learn faster, and scale when it matters. He writes about modern engineering, product thinking, and helping teams ship things that matter.

Through his consultancy, More Than Monkeys, Gary helps startups and scaleups improve how they build software, from tech strategy and agile delivery to product validation and team development.

Visit morethanmonkeys.co.uk to learn how we can help you build better, faster.

Follow Gary on LinkedIn for practical insights into engineering leadership, agile delivery, and team performance.