Non-technical founders ask this question on almost all our TechEye events. How can they hire developers to build a product, if they don’t know what to put in the job specs in the first place?
The answer is that you don’t choose tech. You choose the developer who chooses tech.
If there was a single tech that’s better than all the others in every possible way, surely everyone used that one.
This is not the case: developers have heated discussions about their tech. Go to Hacker News and observe debates. They get as heated as debates on god, vegetarianism or guessing which superhero would win in a fight.
Choosing tech is therefore a two step process.
- Find developers who can build the product, who you trust and can work together with. That determines 90% of the technology choices, because no developer is really good at multiple frameworks.
- Try to find another developer for that same thing, and make sure that your main dev is happy working together with them. If you find it easy to assemble a good team, only then should you proceed.
The best option for you is to avoid originality in any form. If you choose Django/Python/Rails or anything that a lot of people use, then you’ll always have options. Having options matters life or death in situations where a dev team leaves you stranded.
Other than having options and being able to build a product, don’t worry about tech at all.
Whichever tech you end up using, if you can build a team and a product with it, that’s the right tech for you. An average startup rewrites their entire code base every 1-2 years while scaling up. You’ll do well if you can build a business in the meanwhile.