20 Things You Shouldn’t Build At A Midsize SaaS was about technical problems developers at a midsize SaaS shouldn’t try to solve.  Is midsize SaaS development all glue work?  Have all the problems been solved?

Of course not.  Midsize SaaS is the garden of Refactoring, Scaling, and Performance.

To make it sound fancy: The deep work for developers at a midsize SaaS is designing solutions for emergent architectural problems.

A Midsize SaaS Has Different Problems Than A Startup SaaS

Startups have unproven theories about what customers want.  They need to get features out as quickly as possible to test theory against reality.  Worrying about multiple data centers, global latency, or the performance of features customers can’t see, is a waste of time.

At a startup you should write good code, find product market fit, and don’t worry about how the system will perform when you have 10,000 paying customers.

Once you have thousands of paying customers, that’s when architectural gardening kicks in.

How To Support What Customers Want

The startup phase will leave you with a valuable product and an almost random set of assumptions.  You get to puzzle out the assumption, the reality, and choose solutions.

If your systems are in the United States, and all of your customers are in the United States, you will have different architecture needs than if your customers are globally distributed.  Linear and exponential scaling produce different problems and require different solutions.

You need to identify which problems you have, and iterate towards standard solutions.  Standard solutions are critical because it makes your competitive advantage, the differences that are valuable, shine through.  You can’t find the valuable unique differences when everything in your system is bespoke. 

Conclusion

The deep work at a midsize SaaS is identifying emerging problems and iterating towards solved solutions.  Pathfinding from wherever the startup phase has left you towards known destinations.  Moving towards known standard solutions makes it easier to find and improve valuable differentiators.  Building unique versions of everything makes everything harder without adding value to your customers.